Word: lifes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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From the title essay, which deals with the discovery of 19th century Brain Researcher Paul Broca's own brain in a formaldehyde-filled jar in a Paris museum, to his final speculation on out-of-body experiences and life after death, Carl Sagan (The Dragons of Eden) again balances technical expertise with humanistic thinking. The astronomer is not always successful, as when he tries to relate the psychology of the Big Bang to the experience of birth. But he is unassailable on subjects of pure science: the awesome structure of a grain of salt; the strange, hospitable atmosphere...
Peter Quinn is a successful Washington lawyer who hates himself for the compromises made on the climb upward. Edgar Lannin is a cynical Boston-based newsman whose life revolves around alimony payments and self-inflicted assaults on his liver. Friends since their college days at Fordham, the conflicted personnel of George Higgins' newest novel do not really go any place between the book's first page and its last. But the two, who consume enough alcohol to drown W.C. Fields, manage to talk a good life. Their conversations, about sex and the lack of it, marriage, divorce...
...does know a lot about journalism, and some of his best gibes are about television and the press, including one notable satire of a team of excessively cheery newscasters. This is only to be expected from a veteran NBC correspondent who has spent a large part of his life on-camera, as one punchy character says about a TV anchorman, "standing in front of a government building and saying that only time would tell...
...original biographer was Plutarch, who lived, appropriately, in the 1st century A.D. If the definition is stretched a little, the entire New Testament might be considered an example of the art. The first real biography in English, however, did not come until 1791, when James Boswell published his Life of Johnson, which is still the classic by which all others are judged. "Be there a thousand lives, my great curiosity has stomach for 'em all," exclaimed Boswell; his nosy exuberance sends the pages flying. His contemporaries devoured Boswell with as much enthusiasm as we do, but he made them...
...occasionally violent the great man really was, half of England denounced Froude as a scoundrel and a traitor. Biographies were popular in both Britain and America throughout the 19th century, but few modern readers could or would endure them. Speeches and letters were quoted at enormous length-a life of Lincoln ran to ten volumes. Authors were expected to remain discreetly behind the curtains, without a voice or point of view...