Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nice zoologist who is attempting to simplify complex scientific data so more people can understand and appreciate it. But then he goes off on wild tangents, stringing together stupid analogies and speculating about the similarities between purine molecules and some futuristic society in Andromeda out of a science fiction novel he happened to find interesting. This type of rambling based on half-baked ideas that should have been kept in the oven doesn't exactly constitute the stuff of which great works of non-fiction are made...
Although it begins with all the standard props of detective fiction, Thomas Berger's eighth novel is a spoof of whodunits only in the sense that Portnoy's Complaint was a redaction of Oedipus Rex. Berger's chief debt is not to the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler but to the fiction of the '60s (including his own Little Big Man), written before black humor had been eclipsed by black studies. The convoluted and brazenly preposterous plot of Who Is Teddy Villanova? is simply Berger's excuse to practice verbal gunplay with...
...novel's relentless japery is almost sufficient to drown out some bleak thoughts on the state of the urban world. Seen through Wren's eyes, New York City is a ruin in which civility and beauty are relentlessly stamped out. "I suspected that the entire block," he notes, "chosen because it was handsome, had been condemned for demolition and cleared of tenants." Noting that automated garages are replacing the older type, thus putting "churlish" attendants out of work, Wren comments: "One more bit of the inhumane is replaced by the non-human." The author strikes this mordant note...
Garson Kanin, 65, playwright, Hollywood and Broadway director, has a new credit. His latest novel consists of 27 years' worth of work-journal entries. The notes are on a fictive California stage actor named John J. Tumulty, dead ten years when the research starts in 1940. The diarist (coyly named Garson Kanin) tries to create a screenplay from the biographical data. But as Kanin turns and sifts his evidence, mysteries rise from "facts." Conflicting testimony comes from people who knew Tumulty (who bears a resemblance to John Barrymore), among them B.D. (Big Director), the actor's adopted...
Most significantly, the compromise bill envisions a novel approach to punishment under guidelines to be established by a Federal Sentencing Commission. A narrow range of jail terms and fines is to be set up for each specific crime, and judges will be required to record their reasons for each sentence. Either side can appeal any divergence from the guidelines...