Word: details
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mellow has a passion for anecdote, and an extraordinary talent for the exposition of superficial detail. Even for a book of over 600 pages, the amount of unnecessary information he includes is often astounding. In addition to narrating events in Hawthorne's life, for example, Mellow frequently describes exactly what Hawthorne wore. During cold winter mornings in Lenox, Mellow reveals, the author sat in his study wearing an old purple dressing gown made by his wife Sophia. Hawthorne's wardrobe also had its formal side, we discover, although at one time he refused to wear "the white muslin cravat then...
...Hawthorne. Unfortunately, his genuine insights into Hawthorne's character and writings are few. Despite what seems to be painstaking research and a breadth of historical reference, Mellow remains unwilling or unable to take the risks of interpretation necessary to successful biography. He describes people and events in considerable detail, only to suggest nothing about their possible effect on Hawthorne...
...interpretation of Hawthorne's relationship to the Transcendentalists, only observing that "the politics of Concord, transcendental or otherwise, were never to Hawthorne's liking." Bronson Alcott, one of the most famous of the transcendental teachers, lived down the street from Hawthorne's home in Concord; yet the most telling detail that Mellow discloses about the relationship between the two men is that Hawthorne's wife helped Alcott's daughter to mark her clothes with indelible...
...LETTER to a murdered lover, A Man is as overwhelming as mourning and as painful as its sorrow. "You weren't wrong; I was to discover this after your death," the narrator incants as she traces the life of her lover, a Greek freedom fighter. In painstaking detail, she relates to him what she has learned since his brutal death--what was coincidence, what was inevitable. Part survivor, part vindicator, the narrator mentions herself infrequently and addresses the reader just once. This is no one's story but her lover's, a story so great, teaching a lesson so timeless...
...surrender to society will by destroyed by it; a lesson that evil corrodes the left as well as the right; a lesson that freedom is a dream. Fallaci has addressed these in the past, raising them as issues during her interviews, but here she illustrates them in grisly detail: the knitting needles up the urethra, the backstabbing by old friends, and the corruption at every turn. All in urgent prose and laced with love...