Word: detailing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...horror of the crime repells us; we are haunted by the image of our own face screaming in the last minutes of life. A Theodore Bundy-style murder dehumanizes the victim, turning a person into an object. Horrified yet fascinated, we devour the newspaper clippings; each gruesome detail imprints itself on our memory. We become transfixed by the terrifyingly personal nature of random death--the element of chance strips us of all defenses. As a result, any film which tries to minimize the enormity of the crime must fail...
...details of the Nixon trip were settled very rapidly. We proposed two dates, Feb. 21 and March 16; Chou chose the earlier. Problems solved themselves as easily as was compatible with the obsessive single-mindedness of the advance men. The head of our security detail distinguished himself by requesting a list of subversives in each locality the President was likely to visit. This raised an interesting problem; in China conservative Republicans would undoubtedly be classed as subversives, and if we asked how many Communist sympathizers there were we would get the unsettling answer of 800 million...
...topics, specified in some detail, were to consider in course (1) Natural Religion, (2) Revealed Religion, (3) The Validity of Non-Episcopal Ordination, and (4), of particular interest to our consideration, a discourse on the errors of popery. The lecturer on this last subject was required to discuss...
PERHAPS IT IS this hesitancy to generalize, to offer weighty and solemn judgements, that makes Didion's writing so evocative. Instead of pronouncements, she offers reportage. She focuses on an incident and notes every detail in uncluttered, harsh prose. Didion also has the reporter's curiosity about how things work. She investigates how orchids are tended, how freeways are monitored, how lifeguards live, how dams work, the philosophy and history of shopping malls. She is always honest in her examinations of a setting or person. She dams through accuracy, not forceful moral argument. In "Bureaucrats," for example, she perfectly captures...
DIDION'S SENSITIVITY--the very quality that powers her writing--defeats her in the end. She is mired in an emotional bog; the weight of her evocative detail does not allow her to stand back and assess the images she conjures. The White Album's collection of little insights does not add up to one bit one. Didion writes about an intensely debated, copiously documented period, but she doesn't try to impose any order on the chaos. Didion cannot ultimately discipline her own sensitivity, and therein lies the failure of this tightly