Word: idiom
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...byline-less features, the author(s) of its Nov. 6 cover story, "The New U.S. Farmer," had obviously studied up on his Adam Smith economics and his Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics in preparation for this defense of U.S. agriculture, "the productivity wonder of the world." Couched in Timese idiom, readers might almost be lulled into believing this bland prose. But beware -- it is really a simplistic, inaccurate polemic dressed up as objective journalism. It is Time at its myth-making best...
...lives of his characters: a bardic policeman who becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a tramp from his village, a spinster who lives with her father on a remote farm. It is a landscape out of Hardy, but with none of Hardy's ruminative asides; a master of idiom and intonation, Hanley relies on dialogue to disclose character. His prose reads like a play...
...does one write an autobiography confined to the first six years? Crews listened. The image of farmers sitting on their front porches in the sun and reminiscing is more than myth; it was from these garrulous sources that Crews acquired both his material and the lively idiom that animates his narrative. "A way of life gone forever out of the world" is recalled in these pages, enriched by a wealth of unlikely lore: how to estimate a mule's age, cook a possum, butcher...
...hero, and Markus has invented one-however low key-in this somber, eloquent novel: Irving Bender, the son of East European Jews for whom the immigrant dream of success had come to nothing. "Irv's father drank and gambled and died," she writes in her terse idiom. "The mother got along; she got along. Education was life to his mother...
...Irving Bender seems an unlikely hero, it is because he dwells in the midst of poverty-the poverty of faded tradition and of circumstance. Markus dramatizes this familiar condition with a laconic, willfully unliterary style. Her insights possess the character of aphorisms, translated into the sardonic, bantering idiom of immigrant Jews. "A lot you know," is the lesson Irving learns from his mother's death. When he invests in some paintings by an unknown artist who becomes famous, the novelist observes: "No one ever went broke seeing what was right in front of his nose...