Word: martha
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...John Williams boasts that his home has no lock on the front door. But bring up hospital loyalties--an allegiance some Bedford families have solemnly passed down for three generations--and townspeople are likely to get agitated. "You don't get the care you need there," 86-year-old Martha Terrell, a Dunn patient of 50 years' standing, says of the institution she won't patronize. "Whenever anyone new moves to town, I tell them to be sure to come to Dunn...
...dedicated mentor to scores of young writers at this magazine. She took them under her care and helped infuse them with the joy that comes from well-crafted sentences and judgments. One of them, Nancy Gibbs, pointed out in her eulogy that Martha had two great talents as a teacher: "She always knew more than you did. She never pointed that...
Nancy noted Martha's magic for being discriminating but not snobbish. "She hated geraniums, which she called the rats of the garden, and she adored daffodils. She loved Wagner and Merle Haggard, Proust and Trollope and Dick Francis, but she described lunch with Erich Segal as like having "a hot fan blowing in my face." Her interest in the British royals was complex. She loved Princess Di for her instincts but described Charles as "having the survival smarts of a baby seal...
...Martha was diminutive in stature and notoriously soft-spoken. But as our book critic Paul Gray says, "Her voice in print was firm and unmistakably her own. She never raised her voice when annoyed, but her colleagues would have rather endured tongue-lashings from other editors than face her silent disapproval." She spoke and wrote in a style that was flinty and spare; she was allergic to rhetoric. "Oh dear," she would gently say, lips pursed but eyes slightly smiling, as she crossed out a writer's phrase that was more ornate than enlightening. As a result, her words...
...will be clear to anyone, including this reviewer, who knew the author's family when she was a child, models for the fictional characters in Martha McPhee's novel, Bright Angel Time (Random House; 244 pages; $23), were found close to home. Her father, the writer John McPhee, who has written several books on geology, is detectable in lightest disguise as a professor of geology, and the author herself is surely the youngest of several daughters (three in the novel, four in real life), the bemused eight-year-old narrator, Kate...