Word: lifeness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...events in the magician's life, freely rearranged, are played out in stylized, pageantlike scenes. His birth is presented as his first "great escape." But he remains passionately tied to his mother. Her death at the peak of his career leads him to court, then to denounce, the spiritualists who are unable to put him in touch with her. After his own death, his wife Bess holds seances for ten years in an attempt to reach...
...revived Look is sinking, but LIFE, reborn as a monthly, is doing well Esquire, older than either of them, has had its ups and downs, and now has a new ownership seeking to restore it. Any magazine that has been around a while has genes that are risky to tamper with, according to Editor Clay Felker who in less than two rocky years lost $5 million to $7 million of his own and his British backers' money in trying to turn Esquire around...
...first glance, terribly consequential. Arthur Samuels Wolff, nicknamed Duke for his noble pretensions, was neither famous nor accomplished, except at the art of running up unpaid bills, and even that skill deserted him at the end. To Geoffrey and his younger brother Toby, their father's life was a matter of putting on heirs, of inventing a past that never was and promising a future that could never be. Endless rascality ultimately becomes tedious and irksome; all the world loves a confidence man until it discovers its wallet is missing. Yet Wolff's account of this misspent life...
...quest begins with a shock. Upon hearing of his father's death, Wolff blurts out "Thank God." Feeling both self-righteous and ashamed, he decides to plow back into the past, trying to find the man who both made and ruined large swatches of his son's life. A cousin stares at him and says, "He was a gonif, a schnorrer. He was just a bum. That's all he ever was." Wolff decides that the man he once adored must have been more than that...
...come late to religion. It was "no accident," she later wrote, that Gaudy Night, her penultimate detective work, and The Zeal of Thy House, her first religious drama, were "variations upon a hymn to the Master Maker." During her later years, religion became increasingly important in her life. Hone follows Sayers as, dressed in mannish suits, she made her public rounds of BBC talks and academic lectures. But her private life remains largely a mystery-as does Hone's reason for calling this a "literary biography," since it fails to analyze the books or the career. Instead, he splices...