Word: cooke
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...detractors had great fun with Eleanor Roosevelt. Her relentlessly feminist biographer, Blanche Wiesen Cook, goes to the other extreme. Her second volume of Eleanor Roosevelt, a projected three-volume life (Viking; 686 pages; $34.95), runs now and then to hagiography: "Her ethic was simple: She wanted to see the best she could imagine for herself and her loved ones made available to everyone...
...Cook's Volume II--sometimes overburdened with detail but nonetheless fascinating--covers the Depression years of 1933 to 1938, from F.D.R.'s first Inauguration to the eve of World War II. Cook manages a strange optical illusion of history: the men, including F.D.R., sometimes recede to the muzzy margins--the masculine world being crude and obtuse and brutal--while the busy, vivid termagants of Eleanor's circle go about trying to do good and save the world...
Woven through Cook's narrative runs the private thread (titillating, somehow endearing) of Eleanor's long affair with Lorena Hickok, a stout and mannish journalist. In the past, historians have usually sidestepped the question ("...whether Hick and Eleanor went beyond kisses and hugs...there is absolutely no way we can answer with certainty," wrote Doris Kearns Goodwin in No Ordinary Time). Cook simply takes it for granted that the ardor of their correspondence and their lives together was sapphic. Next case...
...Eleanor Roosevelt of Cook's portrait--vulnerable, irritating, indefatigable, self-righteous, almost unthinkably generous--is not an entirely new version of the woman we know, but a more complete one. E.R. had an insufferable side; she also possessed an imaginative humanity that no First Lady--and no President--has matched since then...
...Selection, which debuted in New York City recently, the members of Pilobolus team up with children's authors Maurice Sendak and Arthur Yorinks to compress the ultimate nightmare into an indelibly fearful fable about a troupe of traveling players who miss the last train out of Nazi Germany. Otis Cook gives the performance of a lifetime as a lewdly smirking stranger dressed in death-camp gray who meets them at the station. The music is by Hans Krasa and Pavel Haas, two composers who died in Auschwitz; and the set, by Sendak, has the jarring simplicity of a bedtime story...