Word: detailism
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DENVER: Try this one on: it seems Gay Balfour, a nearly broke Colorado machinist, had a dream one night. In vivid detail, he saw an enormous yellow truck with a green hose that sucked furry little rodents out of the ground. And wouldn't you know it, the next day he had a job at the Ute Mountain Indian reservation, where the farm's irrigation system was being overrun by prairie dogs. On the way home, he noticed an old sewage truck for sale -->
...knew how to cut and run," says the narrator, who had met Elena in Los Angeles; both were regular invitees to Oscar-night parties that strongly resemble, as described here, the legendary ones thrown by the late agent Irving ("Swifty") Lazar. Didion's narrator does not dwell on this detail, but it is dropped nonetheless, as if to show that her heroine has renounced a very glitzy circle of friends...
...economical acronyms for the weaponry and technogadgetry with which he is so obsessed, Clancy cannot seem to turn in a novel that weighs less than a laptop. At 4 lbs. and 874 pages, his ninth, Executive Orders (Putnam; $27.95), is another doozy of laborious plot, bombastic jingoism and tedious detail. This time out, Clancy hero Jack Ryan, former CIA director, National Security Adviser, investment banker and maritime historian, gets the only job left to him that doesn't involve manning a cash register at Denny's: President of the United States...
...this forward motion comes naturally to Reeve, whose task-oriented and detail-oriented nature was heretofore applied to such activities as flying, sailing, scuba diving and horseback riding as well as working for such causes as the environment, children's issues, human rights and the National Endowment for the Arts. His success as an actor was a result of concentration and diligence as much as good looks. "I'm not a naturally gifted actor," he says. "Acting was a long process for me." He adds, "I was just getting the hang...
...Grove Press) and two biographies--Lois Gordon's The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946 (Yale University Press) and an authorized life, Damned to Fame, by Beckett scholar James Knowlson (due in October from Simon & Schuster). Knowlson's book is reverent, exhaustive--3,361 footnotes!--and full of fine detail on Beckett's dogged, monastic creativity. If anyone could know this private man, Knowlson does. And tells...