Word: insights
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...history to find something rotten in Byzantium, the "delirium and horror of the East." There is also the calamity of modernist architecture: "Ubiquitous concrete, with the texture of turd and the color of an upturned grave." The flip side of this disgust is nostalgia. Though Brodsky overwhelms with startling insight and provocations, he is most affecting in "In a Room and a Half," an account of living with his parents in their small Leningrad apartment. There, behind armoires and bookshelves, he built a cozy sanctum. It is his book's truest image: the poet segregated in his heaven...
...academic discipline. Scholars in this field may have originally had their degrees in sociology, psychology, history, political science, anthropology, literature and other fields. They have focused on one part of their discipline, such as "women in literature" just as a biologist may specialize in genetics. They gain further insight through interdisciplinary approaches. Unless Mr. Wise wishes to assert that the above mentioned academic fields are invalid or that interdisciplinary approaches, such as the Social Studies concentration here at Harvard, are academically invalid he has no basis to assert that women's studies are academically invalid...
...intellect and formidable work habits, however, the quintessential outsider became, in his words, a "man of the Senate" who won the respect of political supporters and detractors alike. Said Ronald Reagan last week: "Especially in foreign relations--his chief abiding interest--Senator Javits served our country with tremendous insight and skill...
...long set speeches that his children give are cobbled together from fragments of speech, and Coles is honest enough to admit that the process is apt to make an interviewee sound like a miniature version of the author. In his pages, Coles- like Irish children offer much the same insight as Coles-like Eskimo children: there is good and bad in everyone, and that is the way of the world...
...this insight should require seven books is another mystery, at least for those who believe that readers are capable of arriving at non- comprehension on their own. Coles' distaste for ideas and intellectual analysis is profound and usually presented in his books along with the belief that truth will somehow radiate out of unexamined statements by children. Coles seems to think morality is the indefinable and unpredictable result of simply making decisions. A footnote says, "I can only get a bit mystical here, summon the notion of action as 'transcendence,' and, admittedly, risk murkiness and evasion." But why pass along...