Word: nissenson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Reporter Mary Nissenson and her husband, Anchor-Reporter Mike Parker, have made good use of moving vans and frequent-flier discounts. Of their seven years together, they have lived in different cities for three years. For 2 1/2 years, Parker worked at a Chicago station while his wife toiled in Miami. Then Nissenson moved to New York City, where Parker joined her for a few months. He was rehired in Chicago, and she joined him. Both are ambitious, but they admit to making career sacrifices for their marriage. "Mike left a weekend anchor position in Chicago...
Author Hugh Nissenson's fifth book and second novel purports to be the private diary of one Thomas Keene, 42, a widower who has settled in Richland County, Ohio, on the rim of the then unsettled wilderness. His first entry, on July 1, 1811, is an inventory of his credits and debits, including the $304 he owes the federal land office for the purchase of 160 acres of farmland. If he knew he were writing a story, Keene might decide to begin it with something more exciting than a ledger sheet. But he has no idea, of course, what shape...
...fact transcriptions of what he has seen or heard. He and a scouting party find three friends massacred: "Martha's breasts were skinned. They are made by Indians into bullet pouches, says Beam." That juxtaposition of horror and information perfectly captures the genius of this imaginary diary. For Nissenson has created an apparently loose, formless work that is poetic in its artful selectivity. Scarcely a word is wasted. Hardly an aspect of the struggle to found a new civilization remains untouched. The Tree of Life dramatizes, sometimes with almost unbearable intensity, the American dream and its attendant nightmare. There...
...Nissenson, whose previous fiction (My Own Ground, A Pile of Stones) dealt almost exclusively with Jewish subjects, extends his range with this novel. He never steps out of character to make any of its burdens explicit. Keene does not know the meaning or historical import of the events he jots down in what he calls his "Waste Book." No longer able to believe in heavenly salvation, he does think of his journal as "my hope of Immortality." It will take a few decades to reach a firm verdict, but a first reading of The Tree of Life strongly suggests that...