Word: golden
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...built a mirrored glass-and-steel headquarters in a poor neighborhood of Washington and acquired a lavish 133-acre horse farm in Virginia hunt country. He has also planned to buy the company and offered shareholders a deal that values BET at $800 million. His concept: transform BET's golden logo into the pre-eminent brand name for African Americans by stamping it on everything from restaurants to credit cards, apparel and magazines...
Capturing the flavor of the time as well as of the place, Golden's depiction of Gion during and after World War II is superb. He is even confident enough to have some fun--he includes a wonderful brief passage about Mameha's past encounters with various luminaries who had visited Japan. "She poured sake for the great German writer Thomas Mann, who afterward told her a long, dull story through an interpreter," Golden reports, as well as for Ernest Hemingway, "who got very drunk and said the beautiful red lips on her white face made him think of blood...
Memoirs of a Geisha is crammed with wonderful sentences; Golden's language is almost overwhelming. He is fond of verbal special effects, and his prose reads almost like a poet's at times Image follows metaphor, which follow conceit, which follows simile. There is proliferation of "like" and "seemed and imaginative figures of speech are densely crammed together. Sometime Golden's images ring false--raindrop that hit "like quail eggs," a sky "extravagant with stars," a retired geisha "more terrified of fire than beer is of a thirst...
These lapses are especially evident when Sayuri is still the young Chiyo Golden seems uncomfortable with the voice of a young girl and often strikes note of rather false naivete. As Chiyo enters the okiya and quickly grows up Golden becomes more assured and his prose finds its natural, comfortable rhythm. From this point on, the majority of his startling observations an images have a delicate beauty, almost a if they were adapted from Japanes proverbs...
...Golden would have written a different book if he wished to expose the ugliness of geisha culture; Sayuri ultimately leads a happy life and is satisfied with her lot as a geisha. Yet hints of that ugliness appear even during the most positive parts of his portrayal of geisha's life. The white makeup that transforms an ordinary woman into lovely geisha was once lead-based; this malignant makeup slowly poisoned generation of geisha. Similarly, the most expensive and coveted of a geisha's many beauty ointments is a face cream made of nightingale droppings. Golden has taken even such...