Word: huck
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John McPhee's and Joe McGinniss's books on Alaska appealed to the national myth of God's country and the manly fantasy of Huck Finn's flight from Aunt Sally and her civilizing ways. In the 49th state, one confronted a mystical vastness in which solitude is often confused with freedom. John Rothchild is drawn to a less awe-inspiring part of America: Florida, where the descendants & of the King and the Duke turned swamp into playgrounds and retirement pastures...
Last night Walt Whitman had the strangest dream. There he was, staring out his bedroom window, when who should hop in but Huck Finn, itching to travel. "Dress warmly," Walt's dead mom told him. And we're off to see Louisa May Alcott, who's having an affair with a Tahitian prince. Over there's Charlotte Cushman, the noted actress, playing Hamlet to Emily Dickinson's Ophelia; they become co-stars and lovers. Old Ralph Waldo Emerson is having a chat with the dead Henry David Thoreau: "Sex can be messy...
...poet, remains in Czechoslovakia. Blacklisted into silence, he commits suicide. As a self-described "raconteur of cynical tales," Danny concludes that the only meaning to life is that there is no meaning. "History that repeats itself is a farce" becomes his fancy way of translating Huck Finn's cry from the heart: "I been there before...
Aglow with joy and vitality, grimacing and grinning like a pretty Huck Finn, the star leaps into the song-and-dance number that has been a theme song. She is stepping, she is prancing, she is getting her kicks. Her voice rides on the air, chanting a refrain, meant to be self-mocking, that her personality transforms into a cry of triumph. "Nobody," she sings, "no, nobody does it like me!" -By William A. Henry...
...Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield turned a perceptive innocence against a world that was out to steal their childhoods. But it has long been assumed that they used up the territories of the rural backwater and the prep school. Padgett Powell's twelve-year-old Simons Manigault is proof that they did not. He is in fact one of the most engaging fictional small fry ever to cry thief: sly, pungent, lyric, funny, and unlikely to be forgotten when literary-prize committees gather later in the year. Edisto (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 183 pages; $11.95) is an impressive first novel...