Word: hardwick
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...excitement: the deaf children in West Virginia who each got to pass the torch, then broke into a flurry of sign language; the thundering chants of "USA! U-S-A!" that erupted in St. Louis; the 4,000 people in Oklahoma City who crowded so close to Runner Ken Hardwick that he could only walk his route...
Leone M. Cobb Hardwick...
Completing such a sentence is not guarantee one will finish with any sense of its meaning. Just what Hardwick does mean about the subjects of her essays is often a question that goes unanswered. She seems more concerned with her prose than with her reader, and the erudition generally obscures whatever ideas prompted her to write the piece...
ONLY WHEN HARDWICK focuses upon a work of fiction does she unite form with content. The title essay, "Bartleby in Manhattan", is one of the finest in the collection. She takes Herman Melville's novella. "Bartleby the Scrivener", and dissects it as a verbal tour de force. Bartleby speaks only 37 times in a story of 16,000 words concerning himself, and each time he speaks he does so in a variation of the phrase "I would prefer not to." Hardwick convincingly equates Bartleby's character with the modern New Yorker; his footlessness is the predecessor...
...When Hardwick is so constrained by the limitations of her subject, her writing shines. All too often, though, she darts to and fro without ever leaving a firm point of departure. Her reviews are concerned with stylistic pyrotechnics, while her general essays are generally impenetrable. Hardwick is never dull however, and one reads on simply to decipher her meaning. That the essays are compelling despite their impenetrability is a measure of Hardwick's skill" unfortunately, these essays do not other the reader concrete proof of Hardwick's talent, only the illusory promise...