Word: dinesen
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Poet Judith Thurman, 36, labored to form her first effort at biography, the scrupulous and elegant Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, along accepted Freudian lines. The author, so goes the convention, must interpret her subject psychologically for the reader. Thurman balked at the role of therapist. "Psychoanalyzing is absolutely useless," she recalls. "I was treating Dinesen as a case. I dropped that." Now she views her work as a love affair. "First it was the ecstasy, then total disillusionment, and finally came a deeper understanding and acceptance of the person." As sales and critiques have shown, the result...
...past few years, oversize, prize-winning stories of figures as varied as Somerset Maugham and Theodore Roosevelt, Isak Dinesen and Lyndon Johnson have sold briskly and drawn critical raves. The volumes have rescued the genre from charges that it was succumbing to the as-told-to stories of celebrities like Phil Donahue, such drugboilers as Albert Goldman's Elvis and George Plimpton and Jean Stein's Edie, essentially a snip-and-paste collage of interviews. Moreover, these new lives are not exclusively devoted to the scholarly examination of papers and letters. "Not long ago, most biographies were compiled...
Like many of her contemporaries, Thurman prepared for the task with a concentration that amounted to fanaticism. She learned Danish and followed the tracks of Baroness Karen Blixen, who wrote under the name Isak Dinesen, through Europe, Africa and the U.S. In the Dinesen family's country house, she was allowed to stay the night: "Can you imagine what it was like, lying in bed with the scent of roses and the ticking of clocks in every room, and downstairs were all those papers and letters locked away...
NONFICTION: Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon ∙ Growing Up, Russell Baker ∙ Hospital, Michael Medved ∙ In Suspect Terrain, John McPhee ∙ Isak Dinesen, Judith Thurman ∙ The Path to Power, Robert A. Caro
NONFICTION: Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon ∙Growing Up, Russell Baker ∙Hospital, Michael Medved ∙Isak Dinesen, Judith Thurman ∙Last Stands, Hilary Masters ∙The Path to Power, Robert A. Caro