Word: maughams
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...surprise, then, that it was here in Pago Pago that Somerset Maugham set his famous confrontation between the missionary and Sadie Thompson. Or that discussions of Samoa's moral -- and cultural -- identity continue as heatedly as the much publicized debate between Margaret Mead's classic vision of pastoral innocence (Coming of Age in Samoa) and Derek Freeman's revisionist account of violence and rape (Margaret Mead and Samoa -- The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth). "Being bilingual and bicultural doesn't mean you have to be schizophrenic," says Bernie Oordt, who taught at a local high school for twelve...
Gauguin is a legendary figure, with all the accretions that entails. His legend was helped by other people's fictions, though Gauguin's own existential posturings as hero, Christ-martyr, magus, savage and artist-criminal lay at its root. For many, the hero of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence is still the "real" Gauguin -- a stockbroker and Sunday painter who cracks out of the bourgeois egg, dumps his wife, family and career and hightails it to Tahiti to "find himself" among the breasts and breadfruit. He is part brute and part escape artist, the Houdini of the avant...
Worldwide, French is the first language of some 109 million people, fewer than those who primarily speak English (403 million), Spanish (266 million) or even Portuguese (154 million). Fifty years ago, British Writer W. Somerset Maugham correctly called French "the common language of educated men." Today that distinction incontestably goes to English in the fields of science, technology, economics and finance, not to mention movies, rock music and air travel. As French President Francois Mitterrand said last year, "France is engaged in a 'war' with Anglo-Saxon...
...subtitle, America's Magic Mountain, refers to Thomas Mann's novel of a sanatorium as microcosm. Fair enough; this lively history reflects a galaxy of medical and literary incidents. The cast is worth the entrance fee: W. Somerset Maugham and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walker Percy and Bela Bartok, and even Gerald and Sara Murphy, the '20s couple who decided that living well was the best revenge. They all had one thing in common: tuberculosis, and the refuge in upstate New York offered the promise of recovery. Sometimes it was illusory. Bartok flourished at Saranac but later succumbed to the disease...
Cuomo's mind is swift and shrewd, almost awesome in its ability to grasp and retain material. He takes a lot from his voracious reading. "This morning," he wrote recently in his diary, "I read an hour or so of The Razor's Edge (Somerset Maugham's novel about a restless man searching for inner understanding). It always had good meanings for me." Another morning he rereads portions of Thomas Jefferson's autobiography. "One thing struck me," wrote Cuomo, "the logical forcefulness of his debate...