Word: oprah
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During the worst of his falling out last year with Oprah Winfrey, it was hard to tell that Jonathan Franzen is one of the most nuanced minds at work in the dwindling republic of letters. It's easy to tell that from How to Be Alone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 278 pages), a collection of lucid, saturnine essays that have appeared in various magazines since 1994. Franzen is not the first serious writer to mourn the slow death of serious reading or to be worried about the decay of the moral imagination, each a continuing subtheme in a book that lights...
Only one of the 13 pieces here addresses the Oprah incident, when Franzen voiced doubts about having The Corrections, his supremely successful third novel, selected for her book club. As most everyone knows, it was quickly unselected, and Franzen was cast in some places as the world's dumbest whiner. What was his problem? You get a glimpse of it in an essay describing the tortured afternoon last year when an Oprah film crew prodded him into a contrived visit to his childhood home. That ordeal by television caused him to break out in an itchy rash. But he suffers...
...supported the Family and Medical Leave Act (Dole opposed it, though she now says it has value); he's pro-choice (she's pro-life); he's for coverage of prescription drugs (she's for some coverage); he supports the Brady Bill and closing gun-show loopholes (Dole, on Oprah two years ago, was against assault weapons; in gun-happy North Carolina...
...Janet Fitch novel (and Oprah book) that inspired this perfect-child-in-a-rotten-world drama is a cozy read. Teenage foster child Astrid (Alison Lohman) has monumentally bad luck with mother figures (Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Wright Penn, Renee Zellweger) but endures by taking on the attitudes of the women who disappoint her. Somehow the viewer endures too, because Lohman's pensive loveliness carries the film...
...Over eight years on her nightly broadcasts, Xue virtually became the Oprah Winfrey of Nanjing, feeling the pain of female listeners while taking their calls and reading their letters on the air. While her own somewhat privileged background was hardly as harrowing, Xue still struggled with tough issues?facing early placement in a "black school" for outsiders, dealing with pent-up feelings towards her displaced parents, and coping with sexual ignorance that led her to believe she could get pregnant from holding hands with a man. In The Good Women of China she dovetails her personal life story with those...