Word: burrs
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Leahy also said that classes which meet over reading period will probably be consolidated into fewer buildings and large lecture halls such as Lowell and Burr may be kept closed through reading period until the new term begins...
...keeping with the Thanksgiving season, the networks have begun killing their ratings turkeys. The New Perry Mason Show (CBS), with the bland Monte Markham in the old Raymond Burr role, has been sentenced to oblivion. At least two other shows face a doubtful future: Tenafly (NBC), with James McEachin as a black middle-class suburbanite who shuttles from kids and crab grass to detective assignments; and Faraday and Company (NBC), wherein Dan Dailey engagingly plays a private eye just home after 28 years in a Latin American jail on a trumped-up charge...
...imputing motives to Burr, Vidal hopes to penetrate his subject's mind and explain his behavior. As a novelist, dealing with history, Vidal sacrifices his ability to manufacture situations, but he is free from the strictures binding historians. This may explain the limits facing the historical novelist, but it does little to indicate the benefits a novelist derives from subjecting himself to the constraints of an historical situation. The motives conjured up by the novelist have no source from which to derive validity; they are only the imaginings of a modern writer...
...much different circumstances. It is the story of Julian the Apostate, a late Roman Emperor, and the novel stands in the Walter Pater tradition. But in Julian Vidal did more than merely ascribe motives to an historical actor--he developed the actor into a rather remarkable character. Burr remains an historical figure, with attributed motives, but little real depth...
Which is not to say that Burr is a bad book. It is an enjoyable book. Historical novels are probably never capable of being great, they are rather like muzak in that respect. They can be very bad, or they can be soothing and even good, but the chances of encountering a great historical novel or a memorable bit of muzak are very slim...