Word: doorstops
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...doorstop best sellers go, Herman Wouk's melodramas The Winds of War and War and Remembrance were tolerable entertainment. The historical framework of World War II was well enough known that the author could focus on the adventures of his solid-oak characters without having to teach history. That's not true of The Hope (Little, Brown; 693 pages; $24.95), Wouk's earnest novel about Israel's first two decades, beginning with the fight for independence in 1948 and carrying through...
Conduct Unbecoming has the heft and urgency of a journalistic milestone. But the book's lack of thoughtful underpinning, its failure to distinguish between homophobia and the military's more practical concerns, threatens to turn it into a doorstop...
...once the dust jacket gets it right: What It Takes "does for politicians what Tom Wolfe did for astronauts in The Right Stuff." Left unsaid -- and in this 1,047-page doorstop of an epic only the dust jacket is terse -- was precisely Wolfe's accomplishment in The Right Stuff. Wolfe took an event we all were certain we knew so well that it bored us to tears and convinced us that The Whole Thing Was a Lie. We had so internalized the public relations myths of the original Mercury astronauts that we had missed the real story...