Word: impactful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Such is the case of Joseph Brill, the protagonist of Cynthia Ozick's latest novel. The Cannibal Galaxy. In large part, the success of the novel hinges on Ozick's ability to underscore the sense of anguish within her characters by sophisticated understatement. While Brill experiences travesties of monumental impact, he internalizes much of his anguish, ironically heightening its impact on the reader. More important, Brill's determination to carry out what he regards as his mission in the face of these obstacles endows him with a necessary depth of character. The resulting intensity of the novel surfaces in language...
...guiding--force. It is this undercurrent of anger--against the Nazis who slaughtered his family, his students who are hindered by mediocrity and, most important, at his own failure to excel--that gives the novel its emotional force. By bottling up the tension throughout the novel, Ozick heightens the impact of the climax, and makes Brill's epiphany about himself and the nature of his goals all the more painful...
...novel of the season. The book begins with the clang of a cell door closing in a GPU prison. It ends with a shot in the back of the head in a murky passageway of the prison cellar. It moves with the speed, directness, precision and some of the impact of a bullet. More plausibly than any other book yet written, fiction or nonfiction, it gives the answer to one of history's great riddles: Why do Russians confess...
...platform came Singer Mahalia Jackson. First she sang a slow, sorrowful Gospel song titled I've Been Buked and I've Been Scorned. Her voice was marvelous, but her impact was more in her manner. Near tears, she moved her huge audience to tears. But in the very next breath, she would break into an expression of expectant happiness. When that happened, people who had been sobbing a second before began laughing, sharing in her expectancy...
...passed without notice when it occurred in mid-March 1968, at a time when the war news was still dominated by the siege of Khe Sanh. Yet the brief action at My Lai, a hamlet in Viet Cong-infested territory 335 miles northeast of Saigon, may yet have an impact on the war. According to accounts that suddenly appeared on TV and in the world press last week, a company of 60 or 70 U.S. infantrymen had entered My Lai early one morning and destroyed its houses, its livestock and all the inhabitants that they could find in a brutal...