Word: lifeness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LOOK only at the large strokes in Letters, however, another explanation for its size emerges, one more believable, more acceptable, though less flattering to Barth. Each of his correspondents either relives or believes he is reliving a portion of his past life. Lady Amherst echoing Samuel Johnson, calls it "an epidemic rage for reenactment." Andrews draws up a detailed schedule of the events that led up to his first decision to commit suicide, and realizes he's reliving it all, and heading in the same direction. Each generation in the exhaustive family history of the Cook/Burlingame clan spends the first...
...burden of the past: not a roster of great literary forebears but the author's own bibliography. Barth is getting older, and he hasn't found his Theme. Letters is his middle-age-crisis objectified into a monstrosity. No one can fault Barth for wasting a decade of his life on it, if he just had to get it off his chest. But it's the kind of book a more discreet author would bury in his basement, for posthumous publication alone.JOHN BARTH...
...Turning Wheel is a giant reporter's notebook, crammed with essential details and one-of-a-kind observations. When he injects himself into the story--his feelings on seeing Nagasaki five hours after the bomb was dropped; his conversations with Mao and Marcos--the story comes to life...
Reviewing Shaplen's book is like reviewing 11 books: each chapter has a life of its own. On the Philippines. Shaplen is obsessed with Marcos; on Indonesia, he relies too heavily on economic figures rather than trends and on Korea, his history is hackneyed. But Shaplen surprises you when you least expect it. "More clearly than ever," he concludes, "the solution in Korea, difficult as it may be to achieve, remains unity, not two Koreas...
...worse, so we have to respond"--all but disintegrated. Agency men resorted to another: "We were just following orders." Though Helms and others declined to implicate the chief executives in the most sensitive operations--for example. John F. Kennedy '40 in the attempts out Fidel Castro's life--the message was clear: the CIA was not, in Frank Church's phrase, "a rogue elephant rampaging out of control." The orders had to come from somewhere...