Word: john
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...gift for the short, sharp, descriptive phrase. The Apostle Paul appears as "a deformed wanderer with the label of Tarsus on his baggage." Lutheran Richard John Neuhaus marvels at Taylor's way of playing with a single word: "He whispers it and then he shouts it; he pats, pinches and probes it," each new sentence adding a shade of meaning. Taylor, a veteran community activist and a nationally influential churchman, has been at Concord Baptist for 31 years. He is widely regarded, with justice, as the dean of the nation's black preachers...
SMILEY'S PEOPLE by John le Carré; Knopf; 374pages...
...colorless London house lives George Smiley, Master Spy (ret.). Resolutely out of style, fat as the Michelin tire man, he has long been cuckolded by his wife and betrayed by close associates. It is tune the old cold warrior hung up his spites. Not Smiley. Once more, Author John le Carré trots him out in a flawed and misnamed adventure: Smiley's People is actually about the people's Smiley. All of his endearing characteristics, so well catalogued in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, are herein amplified. Now heading toward 70, the man retains...
Those conflicting observations give Smiley his dimension and Smiley 's People its distinction. Yet aficionados must view this work with mixed feelings. It is melancholy to realize that a weakly plotted book contains the secret agent's last bow. It is reassuring to know that even now John le Carré, Circus Master, is in Switzerland pondering the next big act for the center ring. - Stefan Kanfer
...simplest moral of this quiet, affecting novel might be: Don't Read Tolstoy. John Strickland, 40, is a successful London barrister who casually picks up The Death of Ivan Ilych during an August retreat at the home of his wife's parents. The lawyer finds himself deeply rattled by the Tolstoy hero's mounting despair, especially by the question Ilych asks himself: "Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done?" Querying himself in the same manner, Strickland realizes that he loathes his career, the expensive trappings of his upper-middle-class existence...