Word: masterful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Shaak wrote her master's thesis on the way children's books deal with death. She discovered a "grandfather's gone on a long trip" evasiveness. Her charges read books like A Taste of Blackberries, in which a child dies of bee stings...
...higher praise. "Whenever she did a scene," says Director Robert Lewis, who was a professor there at the time, "you wished that the author were there to see it." She was also much in demand for major roles by the Yale Repertory Theater. By the time she earned her master of fine arts degree she had developed an incipient ulcer: "It was very liberating when I got out to find that you're not competing with 24 people but with 20,000 others...
...never had greater command of his material. At times he is the Jewish Somerset Maugham, spinning yarns of jealousy and violence with the detached tone of a narrator who just happened to be on the scene when the gun went off. At other instances he is a Kafkaesque master of the parable. At still others he is as comic and trenchant as Saul Bellow: a pretentious artist declares, "I must create. This is a physical need with me." A writer who consents to meet with a wealthy vulgarian is enticed with promises: "In the other world, a huge portion...
Novelist John Phillips Marquand died only two decades ago, but social realities and the American literary scene have changed so thoroughly that Millicent Bell's thoughtful biography has become a work of archaeology. Marquand was a master of the literary flashback, now a wholly owned subsidiary of cinema, and a satirist of the rich, who have been depleted by taxes and supplanted by rock promoters and multinational executives...
...Science harvester--is compounded by the illusion that art as a mental discipline is less demanding than science. To begin to appreciate 14th century Italian painting requires at least a thousand hours of visiting galleries plus several hundred more of reading and studying; about the same is required to master differential equations. The average Harvard undergraduate when he sees a painting flashed up on the screen no more appreciates it than a non-mathematician understands algebraic topology. The trouble is that he thinks he has taken all that the painting has to give and nobody is likely to disillusion...