Word: essayed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...answer is probably yes on both counts. Giamatti has a highly refined passion for paradox, a humanist sensibility that is both invoked and evoked repeatedly in every essay, and on nearly every page of this elegantly written book. Winning and bit-time athletics have apparently gone hand-in-hand, but Giamatti is capable of drawing a sharp distinction between the two, and pointing out a hidden incompatibility. Yet perhaps the primary weakness--as well as the primary strength--of this collection is the difficulty the reader shares with Giamatti of reconciling the conflicting notions he posits...
...proved too excessive in its regulatory requirements. In "The Apocalyptic Style," he urges Yale freshmen to pursue a liberal education for its own sake, warning against a "retreat into self-interest"--a not-so-thinly veiled reference to growing pre-professionalism. He says in the book's first essay. "The Private University and the Public Interest," that "the purpose of education, as opposed to information, is to lead us to some sense of citizenship, to some shared assumptions about individual freedoms and institutional needs..." He then bemoans the move "away from an education concerned at heart with ethical choice...
...appear in this book (it doubtless will in his next), and though he is more concerned with the civic than the social dimension of education. Giamatti does not stay mute on contemporary problems. In "Power, Politics and a Sense of History"--a remarkably presumptuous title for a 4000-word essay--he declares...
...connect to anything relevant to non-octagenarian readers, Stories like And Then the Whining Schoolboy With His Satchel, in which the 15-year-old Perelmanesque character finds himself accused for plagiarizing Cooper, Kipling, Stevenson. The Riders of the Purple Sage and half a dozen other works in an autobiographical essay for a tenth grade class, makes it pretty far across the historical gulf. The scenario is ticklish and one need not have a turn-of-the-century birth certificate to appreciate it. Another, Wanted--Short or Long Respite by Former Cineaste, a meandering through some silent film memories, just doesn...
...House of Stewardesses, in which the actors attempted to achieve the illusion of objects flying from the screen by swaying like pendulums. This was followed by Whispers of the Wolf ("Boy, sounds really scary, eh, kids!" howled the Count), which turned out to be an essay in abject despair by Ingmar Bergman, complete with a dwarf, camera compositions like geometry proofs and racked dialogue like "Life makes me vomit" - all of it rendered in subtitles that were almost obscured by dirt in the corner of the projector...