Word: odyssey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...predominantlyfemale, spotted here and there with a reluctanthusband, an enlightened male or an entire bookclub. Instead of filling the hour by readingexcerpts from his book ("We're all literatebecause our parents read to us every night," hequipped, "read us to sleep!"), Golden chose totell about the ten-year odyssey that lead to thepublication of Memoirs of a Geisha...
...change, of "coming of age." This psychological change is paralleled or rather symbolized by a slow loss of weight and a gaining of beauty. She becomes slowly aware of a new sexual identity growing along with her intellectual capacities, and it is really on this aspect of her odyssey that the novel dwells. This sexual flowering as a physical manifestation of Jane's spiritual awakening has rather disturbing implications. She begins the novel as a pudgy, insecure nonentity and she finishes it as a slender, successful, pretty non-entity. Her "change" is really the fulfilling of a chauvinistic societal ideal...
...years ago, the journalist, who has written books on the Reagan Administration, nuclear energy and the Beatles, set off on a trip around the world in search of noxious vistas and pollutive sunsets--the environmental wreckage that other travelers take pains to avoid. His clear-eyed report, Earth Odyssey (Broadway Books; 372 pages; $26), backed by careful scholarship, is one of the best environmental books in recent years. It may help save readers the trouble of living through ecological decline and fall, if enough of them figure out how and where to apply its bitter lessons...
...survived this odyssey without losing some part of himself? A public majority that listed declining morality as a top concern found itself defending a President who most of them believed had committed a crime. Republican lawmakers voted along party lines, over public protest, to impeach a popular President from the opposing party and in the process dissolved their authority in acid on the House floor. The press corps that viewed itself as the public's conscience became the object of its scorn. Hillary Clinton, who for years had been vilified for leveraging the power of her marriage, was extolled...
...living writing letters for the illiterate. When a customer is killed in an accident, the dead woman's son (the winsomely suspicious Vinicius de Oliveira) becomes Dora's responsibility. The two set out across the Brazilian vastness to find the boy's errant father. Theirs is an odyssey of simple problems, simple emotional discoveries, a relationship full of knots that Salles permits to unwind in an unforced, unsentimental fashion. His imagery, like his storytelling, is clear, often unaffectedly lovely, and quietly, powerfully haunting...