Word: harms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Stimson to disclose America's plans for the atom bomb to the Soviet Union. Only his overriding concern with maintaining the judicial propriety and his skill at perpetuating the "myth of judicial seclusion" kept Frankfurter's lobbying publicly unknown for so long. That--and his tacit ability to harm the careers of those who threatened to buck his will by revealing his extraordinary lobbying efforts through his backdoor to Congress and his ties with Roosevelt administrators...
Atwood's air of unflappability is exactly what one would expect from the assured, seamless flow of her prove and poetry. On one level her protagonists--especially Rennie Wilford, the young "life styles" journalist central to Bodily Harm--are smooth and sophisticated, gliding productively through life. It is this apparent power, most likely, that prompts so many feminists to claim her work as the ideological property of the women's movement, a tendency which leads naturally to the temptation to dismiss her male supporting characters as evil insensitive foils for the struggling females. The temptation is false, through: Atwood...
WHAT THE FEMINIST interpretation of Atwood's work ignores, though, is the texture and depth of even the most textbook "liberated" characters. In Life Before Man, the novel before Bodily Harm, for instance. Lesje, one of three narrators who form a triangle, holds a paleontology job at a Toronto museum. She works there passionately, betraying encyclopedic knowledge, weaving elaborate Cretaceous fantasies Atwood's twist makes the job consist in large measure of classifying, cleaning and filing innumerable Jurassic fish earbones...
...Bodily Harm takes such complexities further, building an entire story line on the freelancer Rennie's gap between outer confidence and inner decimation. Her fluffy but well-ordered life having suddenly exploded in a partial mastectomy, a breakup with the man she lives with and subsequently a death threat. Rennie successfully wheedles her editor into sending her to write a travel piece on St. Antoine, an obscure Caribbean island. The Caribbean sun is soothing, but the islanders are fomenting revolution; and the steadily more surreal chain of events that lands Rennie in a tropical jail teaches her only...
...THEORY STILL LINGERING in this twilight of the Me-Generation holds that apology is never necessary. If the results of an act can be traced to malicious intent, the reasoning goes, then apology stands naked as the tribute vice pays to virtue. If, on the other hand, no harm is meant, then apology is equally gratuitous...