Word: detailism
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...richness of information and exhaustive detail is one of Cline's book's most praiseworthy achievements. Unfortunately, it's also the factor that consistently weighs it down. Cline seems to have aimed to write both a scholarly work and one with popular appeal. But her careful, exhaustive and often pedestrian style makes it a slow read and a frequently heavy one; there's no inspired prose to be found here. The text's punctiliousness about names and dates is a mixed blessing, of course: for the reader with a consuming interest in Hall, or a general fascination with early lesbian...
...Cline's credit, the book isn't a hagiography. Her obsessive attention to detail and her effort to represent more than one side of a given story leaves us with a picture of Hall as a person who, in the final analysis, falls considerably short of sainthood. Hall's behavior toward each of her long-term partners when she fell in love with someone else was unpleasant, to say the least: it's tacky by any standards to start dating your lover's nurse while she's laid up in the hospital. Hall was also a possessive and controlling lover...
...Near week's end, [President] Kennedy flew into Manhattan, aged his Secret Service detail ten years by forgoing the usual motorcycle escort into the city. At one of ten midtown traffic lights that stopped the presidential limousine, an ambitious female camera bug rushed up and fired a flashbulb at Kennedy's side of the car. Moaned a New York police official: 'She might well have been an assassin.'" --Nov. 22, 1963, date of issue on sale the week Kennedy was shot in Dallas...
...many parents unwittingly pressure students to carry out their own unfulfilled dreams. The mere fact that their children are attending Harvard may cause parents to feel jealous or want to adopt their children's experiences as their own. Perhaps they just want to visit, genuinely wanting to hear every detail of every day of college life...
...gifts -- including that now infamous book of Walt Whitman poetry. The President admitted talking with his friend Vernon Jordan, who resumed his grand jury testimony Thursday, about the Washington power broker?s efforts to find the former intern a job. But -- and perhaps this is the most important detail -- Clinton added that it was Betty Currie, not himself, who initiated that job hunt on Lewinsky?s behalf. Currie, the President?s private secretary, has been called to testify a second time before the grand jury...