Word: mensch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
REGURGITATIVELY, Barth lifts his characters, these war correspondents of the literary battlefield, from each of his past books. The one new creation, Lady Amherst, is also the best. Her sequence of letters to the author describes the progress of her affair with Ambrose Mensch, a dilettante writer late of Lose in the Funhouse. Barth makes a feeble effort to set her up as an allegorical representation of "Belles Lettres," on which her--or Ambrose--hopes to father forth a new novel, but she balks, her past liaisons with famous men of letters notwithstanding...
...affair of Lady Amherst and Mensch holds the reader's chief interest and sympathy because it's the most coherent and human part of Letters; the other characters dance a contorted jig about it, A. B. Cook III and his descendant A. B. Cook VI send their unborn children endless genealogical accounts of the family's intrigues, centering around the War of 1812. Jerome Bonaparte Bray, part dictator, part human fly, part servant of a computer, plots a Second American Revolution. Todd Andrews--still alive, despite The Floating Opera's denouement--writes to his dead father contemplating a second suicide...
...Fell to Earth. This man is hardly a mensch, that is when they show Bowie in the buff he doesn't even have a schlong! Woo woo! So that's why he came to America (penis envy.) Otherwise you wouldn't know. The movie is beautifully filmed and sometimes stands on the verge of not only showing intelligent life but also being the most cleverly wrapped political package since Chinatown. And then all of a sudden whap!--it's the dumbest one since The Day the Earth Stood Still. An article in last Thursday's Times about the Rugoft theater...
...young person grows out of his childish impulses and selfish desires. But young Kravitz shows little sign of any development at all, and we are left to guess whether or not he will serve out his apprenticeship and become a master or as Cohen would call it, a mensch...