Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sundays, beginning Jan. 27.) Perhaps the hardest thing to capture on film is a mind at work, and scriptwriters usually resort to obvious devices: a composer tinkling tunes on the piano, a novelist tearing paper out of his typewriter or a scientist pouring foul-looking glop from one test tube into another. But revealing thought in action is exactly what the creators of this new BBC series have done, and the size of their achievement is indicated in the title. The mind they are portraying is that of Charles Darwin; the idea they are presenting is the evolution of life...
...tightly written novel. Comedians contains just one star other than its central comics, and she is only a walk-on. It needs no more. The cast is perfect, and the comedy unfailingly original. There are no libidinous or abusive producers, no hysterically egomaniac directors, not even a failed novelist making a rich, bitter livelihood by writing for the screen. The author has been a novelist (Hard Rain Falling, The True Life Story of Jody McKeegan); he has also been a movie and TV working stiff, and what he is offering here is an accurate, lightly ironic record of the laid...
Ogilvie speaks for such stars when, finally, the team steps onstage in Vegas to a melange of light and laughter: "This is love, my friends, and the hell with the rest." Novelist Carpenter knows better; the comedians' implicit longing for normality and humanity proves that. But Carpenter also knows that the simulacrum of love with which his comics are re warded is more than most people, leading their ad hoc, late 20th century lives, ever get. There is bite here, but no bitterness. The overall, and lasting, effect makes A Couple of Comedians an unusually literate and oddly touching...
Such is the range of sentiment these days of those who really fought the last U.S. war, or so it seems in the creative mind of Novelist Josiah Bunting. The Compellas, Robertson and Lemming are fictional characters from Bunting's superb story of that sad war, The Lionheads, written in 1971. Last week, on the campus of Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, where he is president, Bunting updated his characters and their concerns. In these odd times the novelist's eye may tell us more about our emotions than the purveyors of polls...
...Novelist George O'Toole, a former CIA official and author of An Agent on the Other Side, follows sleuth and Booth with verve, humor and impressive scholarship. As he points out, "In the century that has passed since one of the most important single events in American history, not a single book written about it, traditionalist or revisionist, can be relied upon to be accurate, even as to details that should not be controversial, and which don't seem to have any sinister meaning." For lovers of the Learned Footnote, this may be one of the most edifying...