Word: paragraphs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Rifkin's treatment of history best illustrates the deficiencies of a book to which any reader alienated by modern society would gravitate to as an answer to his problems. In one tidy half-page paragraph, Rifkin summarizes the historical theories of Toynbee, Spengler, Ortega y Gasset and Marx, allocating each scholar one sentence in this day of scarce resources. His next paragraphy begins...
...course he repeats himself. But why keep silent when the frenetic lives of all the Moskowitzes, Fishbeins and Koppelmans in Brooklyn are kvetching around in your head? If a paragraph misses, one goes on to the next; to an essay on scientists experimenting with anti-choking methods...
...without inadequacies of her own. She write often for magazines like Ms., Viva and Ladies' Home Journal, and either her editors or her own sense of her audience mar some of the pieces in Off Center. The McCall's article on the Moonies, for instance, opens with a paragraph as purple and swollen as a bad bruise. Sometimes Harrison's inspired chat turns to chaff--she goes completely gaga over Dick Cavett in a profile piece that is all flutter and giggles, just like the show. Occasionally we get the feeling that she is using words and criticisms...
...resurrection before believers' eyes are rarely called upon to make good on the promise. Authors ought to be more accountable, though, and when one chooses to title a novel The Second Coming he'd better deliver some sort of a revelation--epiphany if not apocalypse--before the final paragraph. But Walker Percy has years of experience in promising more than he delivers. His style exploits the worst qualities of that discredited category, the Novel of Ideas: he trots out a series of tired, baldly stated rhetorical questions and parades them in masquerade as the personal dilemmas of his characters...
...resurrection before believers' eyes are rarely called upon to make good on the promise. Authors ought to be more accountable, though, and when one chooses to title a novel The Second Coming he'd better deliver some sort of a revelation--epiphany if not apocalypse--before the final paragraph. But Walker Percy has years of experience in promising more than he delivers. His style exploits the worst qualities of that discredited category, the Novel of Ideas: he trots out a series of tired, baldly stated rhetorical questions and parades them in masquerade as the personal dilemmas of his characters...