Word: boyds
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...Senate floor to rail against the looming conflict. While other Senators muted their criticism, Byrd derided President Bush as "reckless and arrogant." He also denounced his fellow Democrats: "This chamber is, for the most part, silent--ominously, dreadfully, silent." Byrd's words lit up the Internet. Wes Boyd, the head of MoveOn.org a liberal group that opposed the war, received 15 copies of the speech from fellow activists in 72 hours after it was delivered. "It's the way stump speeches were delivered generations ago," says Boyd. "It was tacked on a wall and a crowd gathered to read...
...police headquarters and go to the press conferences, not break news." But that changed after Blair caught fire: newsrooms in New York City and Washington fizzed each time he tossed a new scoop on the table--the grape stem found at a murder scene with suspect Lee Boyd Malvo's DNA on it, his supposed videotaped confession. Some of Blair's colleagues argue that the competitive passion that has driven some of the paper's recent triumphs, particularly its coverage of 9/11, may also have left the impression on an impressionable reporter that getting beat is worse than getting...
...Boyd was born in Ghana and lives in France, but he is a comic novelist in the best English tradition of Waugh and Amis (Kingsley, that is). Any Human Heart is the diary of Logan Mountstuart, an English writer whose long, languid life begins in 1906 and embraces most of the 20th century. Mountstuart starts his diary as a senior in high school--a sixth former, as they say--and goes on to chronicle his years at Oxford, his early literary efforts and his assorted marriages and affairs. Sophisticated and self-deprecating, flip-flopping between passionate love and fashionable ennui...
Mountstuart is too much of a hedonist to grieve for long, however. Soon his high spirits buoy him back to the surface, and he's off again: to New York City as an art dealer, to Africa as a professor of English, and beyond. Throughout, Boyd expertly keeps up the irregular tap-tap rhythms of diary writing--often the gaps in Mountstuart's chronicle, when he is too depressed or having too much fun to write, are as eloquent as the words themselves--and Boyd has a biographer's eye for arranging the multitudinous ironies and serendipitous connections that...
...writes. "It refuses to conform to your needs--the narrative needs that you feel are essential to give rough shape to your time on this earth." Mountstuart struggles heroically to give his life this rough shape. He never quite does so. That's his failure as a person--but Boyd's triumph as an artist. --By Lev Grossman