Word: lifeness
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...stood just inside the door and took stock. Everything in it had been taken for granted.” This is not simply a story about one man and his tragic fall—rather, the novel chronicles a disease as it ravages a man, his family, and his life...
Ferris effectively uses the illness as a foil to the pernicious corporate environment to which Tim belongs, taking up the critique that he began in his first novel, but on a different front. It is this premise of two opposing ailments as they compete for Tim’s life that distinguishes “The Unnamed” from among a field of clichéd and poorly written romantic tragedies...
...frostbitten fingers and toesit leaves behind the immaterial and the eternal—love, devotion, and his mind. By forcing Tim to reevaluate what is most important to him, the illness reverses the apathy and obliviousness that his job and fortune created in his personal life. He is compelled to value what he does have, renewing his relationship with his wife Jane and beginning one with his daughter Becka, until then largely ignored...
Ferris is at his best when he focuses on Tim’s struggle with his illness, his job, and his family life. But in intermittently weaving a murder mystery through the novel, Ferris fractures the stylistic, thematic, and narrative unity without adding much to the development of characters or plot. Grisham-like clichés interrupt a compelling account of sickness and struggle. Bland elementary characters from this extraneous and gratuitously blood-spattered thriller story-line are introduced and annoyingly revisited...
...couple days ago, the New York Times reported that the student body at the University of North Carolina was 60 percent female. That leads us to ask this question: how would life at Harvard change if we had a 60-40 split...