Word: lifeness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...force the pieces, he warned himself. Store them away. Patience. But how to be patient when he had so little time? ... All his professional life, it seemed to Smiley, he had listened to similar verbal antics signalling supposedly great changes in Whitehall doctrine; signalling restraint, self-denial, always another reason for doing nothing. He had watched Whitehall's skirts go up, and come down again, her belts being tightened, loosened, tightened. He had been the witness, or victim-or even reluctant prophet-of such spurious cults as lateralism, parallelism, separatism, operational devolution, and now, if he remembered Lacon...
...Falcon and the Snowman omits no telling detail - about falconry, the drug trade, spy satellites, the duo's stoned bum-bung, and their torturous legal battles after capture. But there are enough tantalizing loose ends in the book to make it clear that Lindsey is describing life, not art. Why, for instance, did TRW put a 21-year-old, $140-a-week college dropout in such a sensitive post? Did the leaks really damage U.S. security? Perhaps Boyce and Lee actually were being used by the CIA to spread false evidence. If not, concludes Lindsey, then "the affair...
Contrary to cliché, Hollywood does not manufacture dreams; it preserves them in strips of celluloid that promise eternal life. Hollywood embalms desire. Hollywood is a necropolis lined with deities made to appear more beautiful and menacing than they really are. Hollywood, In short, is a good read, even when encountered in Moviola, an overwrought, eulogistic novel about the film business. The book is a greenhorn-to-mogul saga with cameo performances by great stars of the distant and recent past. There is even a bit part for Thomas Alva Edison, without whose inventive genius...
Farber is more convincing, even when he sits Barrere down (after dinner with Fred Astaire, the Jimmy Stewarts, Claudette Colbert, the Gregory Pecks and the Henry Fondas) and tells him his life story. It is an epic feature that includes three wives, mistresses, ups, downs and flashbacks from movie history. Farber is present at the Creation. After his theater chain folds he becomes production assistant to Mack Sennett at D.W. Griffith's Biograph studios in New York. Sennett and Mabel Normand carry on their Keystone Kops love affair; Harold Lloyd simulates climbing the side of a building...
...Such mid-life crises threaten to become as much a cliché in literature as they are in life. Yet Piers Paul Read, 38, puts a lot of his native English on this familiar pitch. He knows, as most chroniclers of Me Decade shenanigans do not, that private acts have public consequences; in the great tradition of British novelists, he draws society as a delicate, vast spider web, tuned to vibrate at the lightest footfall or breath of scandal. In addition, Read is a self-described "serious Catholic" and scales this novel to dimensions familiar to readers of Graham Greene...