Word: lifes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...pieces together--the unlikely hero is a sniveling Dutch embassy employee--it is about ten people too late. Sobhraj--who has escaped from prisons and tight situations like a super criminal--proves mortal. Having tred the fine line between sanity and psychosis for the better part of his life, he finally slips into a murderous abyss...
...subject, and quotes liberally from other people's remembrances, letters and other documents. But he doesn't let the facts obscure the phenomenon. Admittedly Thompson goes overboard with the dramatics at times. He delights in ominous tag lines, affixed to long stretches of narrative. As Charles ponders life in a Dehli jail cell. Thompson writes about his future. He required "a country in which he was neither known nor wanted by police, one in which riches abounded, one whose borders were easy to traverse illegally, one whose residents were generous with attention--and applause." The author concludes Sobhraj's destiny...
Poor Professor Handlin--his true life's work has been abused and distorted by faction writers. Mario Puzo, author of Fortunate Pilgrim, betrayed the historical method in fabricating "the shiny Godfarther" less than ten years later. And television, that boxed perpetrator of evil, flaunts docudramas such as "Washington Behind Closed Doors," and "Truman at Potsdam...
...MISSION--to popularize contemporary science--is beyond reproach. Yet, like a hard-sell broker, his execution is chronically faulty. In this collection of 25 essays he spreads before the reader a whole gamut of the most tasty scientific ideas, concepts, and predictions, ranging from the prospect of extraterrestial life to the role of gestation in shaping world religion. But he skips frenetically from one to the next, milking only the most sensational aspects and indulging freely in irresponsible speculation. Our aggravation is heightened by his persistent editorial voice in the background, applauding the genius of this, the limitless potential...
Aside from this, however, Sagan retreats into the misty land of speculation--on the future, on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, on the possibility of intergalactic communication. For example, he draws a hyperbolic and fatuous parallel between the Big Bang theory of the birth of the universe, and the human birth experience. He proposes a seemingly infinite number of theories in these chapters and substantiates each less well than its predecessor, abandoning totally the close scrutiny he has just advocated so strongly...