Word: essayists
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This is a fair example of the author's wafting prose style. Phrases like "an awesome move toward humanness" and such gauzy generalizations as Communists "were like everybody else, only more so" swell throughout her pages. Yet the book does have a vital core. Gornick, an essayist for New York's Village Voice, stages her psychopolitical Liebestod with a living chorus of former Communist activists whom she interviewed in various parts...
DIED. James M. Cain, 85, author (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce) known for stark portrayals of violence and sexual betrayal; of a heart attack; in University Park, Md. After a stint as an essayist for H.L Mencken's American Mercury, Cain moved to Hollywood. Although he failed as a scenarist, his crime stories and novels won critical acclaim for his portrayal of what Cain called "the dreadful, the impious, the shame of God." His adrenal, brooding style influenced later writers, including Albert Camus...
Like the cells about which he writes, the essayist battles on, searching not only for the sources of the body's ills, but for the far more elusive thing that theologians call the soul. He recognizes, ultimately, that the Grail he seeks is less likely to be found in floodlit operating rooms than in the darkness of the mind. "It is not the surgeon who is God's darling," concludes Selzer. "It is the poet who heals with his words, stanches the flow of blood, stills the rattling breath, applies poultice to the scalded flesh...
Japanese honor may be partially satisfied, but some Italians see the affair as an assault on their traditional humanism. Writing in Milan's Corriere della Sera, Essayist Luigi Compagnone jestingly defended the Cat and the Fox as "two small-time cheats, emeritus champions of the art of getting by," a talent that he says is attributed to the people of southern Italy. Japan, he added, is "a superindustrialized country, where the myths of superproduction have inserted themselves in the daily reality to the point of spasm. It does not know or accept anything but the frightening morality of integral efficiency...
Hough moves with an essayist's grace from lemonade to his dislike of meetings, from Virginia Woolf to George Borrow. He is never sentimental, but he does not give up on old affections either. He is master of the splendidly abrupt transition: "In December 1971 I threw out all my city shirts, hoarded since 1926." Or: "Today Graham ate a whole banana." Or, with drastic irony: "Someone is sure to mention sex." Perhaps predictably Hough has it in for Sigmund Freud because he feels that the good doctor unwittingly damaged the possibilities of romance and encouraged the adoption...