Word: books
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...depth. Prescott's anecdotal effort does not bear comparison with it. Playing Leonard Lyons to the age, Prescott not only misses the central drama but often seems to substitute bizarre performance for more illuminating characterization. Perhaps it is simply that there are too many characters: in a book that revolves around famous families, there are no fewer than 29 d'Estes, 23 Sforzas, 23 Gonzagas...
Because their motives and personalities are less obscured by distracting flamboyance, it is the women-the ones who loved the scoundrels-who emerge, almost subliminally, as the book's most understandable human beings. Lucrezia Borgia, unjustly slandered as a poisoner and profligate, seems much to be pitied -a woman who may have had a lover or two but who gave her third husband at least seven children before her death at 39. Only a few women railed at their fate. Beatrice d'Este Sforza, pregnant and angered at her husband's open infidelity with...
...least of the novelist's functions is to serve as a moral bookkeeper, making all those entries on the liability side of the ledger that a society might otherwise prefer to forget. In his new book, ruefully comic Novelist Jerome Charyn (Once Upon a Droshky) records the shape and the existence of a small, dreadful chapter in our recent national history...
...tends to treat his leading characters as if they were dukes and dauphins of some royal court, dwelling upon their power drives at the expense of their unquestioned professional skill, he is at pains not to take explicit sides. Clearly Talese does not care for Daniel. Yet the book's main characters, Reston and Daniel, are not hero and villain but nearly equal protagonists. Daniel is shown as a careerist who cultivates worldly graces and helpful grandees. Against that, the reader can balance Reston's less blatant but equally tenacious ambition, and his curious notion that what...
...Timesmen Talese describes are not likely to be grateful to him. Sometimes he presents them in quasi-cari-cature. But for all his citified cynicism about personalities, Talese and his book remain oddly in awe of the "good gray lady." and some of his ripest overwriting is put to the service of its glorious past and present. This means that the New York Times emerges from Talese's chronicle-cum-novel with most of its mythology intact. A good reason why The Kingdom and the Power, like the newspaper itself, is best read with a selective...