Word: entertainment
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gingerich is one of a rare breed of professors who take the time to sculpt their courses so that they entertain as well as instruct...
...down in a glut of detail. The book's most conspicuous shortcoming is an absence of the engaging Williams voice and personality as they emerged in his chatty, scurrilous Memoirs (1975). Spoto, who did not know his subject personally, captures neither the man's whimsy nor his power to entertain, views his perversities with apparent distaste and responds with plodding, academic disapprobation to Williams' generally innocuous love of exaggeration and self-dramatizing...
...sheer swell of it. Traveling with an entourage of 20 in his private Boeing 727 (dubbed Capitalist Tool, after the magazine's slogan), Forbes made his first stop at the Grand Palace in Bangkok. He brought along an $80,000, 90- ft.-tall, elephant-shaped balloon to entertain the royal family, but high winds curtailed the flight. Forbes is not bothered by little deflations though, or by large round sums. The trip's $250,000 cost will come out of his own pocket, he said, with no tax deduction...
...which masterfully brings together two awkwardly coexistent branches of the historical novel tradition. Combining the solid factual background of authors like Tuchman or even Michener with the torrid, and sometime, sordid, human details of John Jakes and Harold Robbins. Hersey manages both to inform and to entertain throughout almost 700 pages. And he weaves his complex mosaic around one central, compelling theme--the hidden disaster embedded in the "offer" by the West, and "acceptance" by China, of the "forbidden fruits" of modern arts, science, and Christianity...
Rivers poses some interesting questions and makes some interesting points, but the book still isn't very satisfying. It is supposed to shock people into believing, even perhaps approving what he does, but it doesn't even entertain. Questions like "Does the United States hire assasins?" are not shocking since the CIA's assasination attempts against Fidel Castro were revealed some two decades ago. At least those stories from the Castro plots were funny...