Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...like tobelieve. To freak out in Cambridge is not just tofreak out, it is to freak outsignificantly. Perhaps it's just because Ilike writing that the Harvard-consciousness is sostrong, but I don't think so. I always have thesneaking feeling that I am living out someoneelse's Harvard novel or memoir, or that friendsthink they are somehow acting out the script tothe play of the human condition...
...relationships become "Love Story," allwriters are Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, orT.S. Eliot, all politicians are FDR, allsocialites are Edie Sedgewick, all academics areJohn Kenneth Galbraith--brilliant, savvy, sexy,worthy of a bad Harvard novel. In the same vein,all depressions become suicidal, and happinessresembles a Soma Holiday...
...tale. And when we get to the legal arguments, we don't get much of a scholarly analysis of either the appeals process or the real issues. Dershowitz does a fine job telling two stories. But the problem is that we would much rather read a totally trashy novel or a good sociological study or a good legal analysis, not all three at once...
...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...