Word: oakes
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Dorothy West is a tiny, talkative, 88-year-old brown woman writer who lives and works -- and these days amiably inscribes books and serves tea to a procession of admiring visitors -- in the upper-middle-class African-American community of Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard. Brown is her word, used carefully and with mild amusement, because among the Massachusetts resort island's summering black aristocracy, light has always been right, and shadings of color are measured with precision. When West was a child, as she relates in The Richer, the Poorer (Doubleday; 254 pages; $22), her new collection...
...read the old writer's short pieces in the Vineyard Gazette, the island's weekly newspaper. She took to visiting West each Monday, and egged her on to finish a long-stalled second novel. When The Wedding (Doubleday; 240 pages; $20), a wry view of color and status in Oak Bluffs, was published in February, its dedication read: "To the memory of my editor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Though there was never such a mismatched pair in appearance, we were perfect partners...
...instance, A.C., a character in the second section of the book, "Field Events," brings to mind a gigantic oak tree or a gentle bear. He is immensely strong (he picks up cows and spins around with them on his shoulders) and acutely aware of his surroundings, even imagining the earth is shaking when he kicks...
Although we had the same course work andassignments as the men, Widener was off limits. Wewere confined to a little room off the periodicalroom containing two oak tables and six or eightuncomfortable chairs. Eventually graduatesstudents and candidates for honors were admittedto the main Reading Room. When Lamont opened, nowomen were allowed...
Comfort level: Medium. Robbins does offer the three most comfortable seats of all the Harvard libraries. Supple red leather wing chairs and matching ottomans are dangerously alluring. Other chairs in this library are ripped or shredded and do not match the abundant oak paneling. You many find this obsession with interior decorating absurd, but the best studying comes from a mind that is at peace with its environment. So there...