Word: lemurs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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John Banville is an Irish writer of austere, erudite, literary novels. A Booker winner, he's famous for being relentlessly highbrow. Benjamin Black writes mystery novels; his slender, nasty The Lemur (Picador; 132 pages) appears this month. The funny thing about Black is that he and Banville are the same person...
Which brings us to The Lemur. It's the story of John Glass, a formerly crusading journalist who has been reduced, by ennui and a rich marriage, to writing the biography of his father-in-law, a plutocrat with a sketchy past. Glass hires a hacker to rake up some muck. The hacker rakes up so much muck that he gets himself shot neatly through the left eye. As Black tells us (at least four times, in different ways), "Everybody has secrets, mostly guilty ones...
...ankles of his father-in-law. But watching him try to do what a mystery writer does shows you what's so tough about it. Good genre writers know how to express ideas and emotions through events--plot--rather than dialogue or evocative descriptions. Precious little happens in The Lemur other than Glass trading icy quips with his wife. If Benjamin Black is John Banville's guilty secret, he needs to find a much, much guiltier...
...dinner for big cats. In others, they lend a hand to the local flora by eating plants and dribbling seeds around. Primates are certainly crucial to the global food chain, but as Nadler says, it's hard to know what would happen to the larger environment if a few lemur species on Madagascar died off tomorrow - and it's a question that scientists have been working for decades to avoid having to answer. In the last 50 years, only a few primates have been lost to extinction, but some worry the worst is yet to come. "The great fear...
After Cambridge, Richard earned her doctorate in anthropology at the University of London. She has focused her studies on the Madagascar lemur, and in recent years, her attention has turned to protecting the forests inhabited by the lemur...