Word: phrasings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...writer who casts a preacher as a fool and a villain had best not be preachy. Kingsolver manages not to be, in part because she is a gifted magician of words--her sleight-of-phrase easily distracting a reader who might be on the point of rebellion. Her novel is both powerful and quite simple. It is also angrier and more direct than her earlier books, Animal Dreams and Pigs in Heaven, in which social issues involving Native Americans remained mostly in the background. The clear intent of The Poisonwood Bible is to offer Nathan Price's patriarchal troublemaking...
Every four years the political press corps digs into closets, rummages through attics and basements, dragging out the industrial-strength parkas, the mukluks, the Gore-Tex vests and the flannel-lined chinos, as we prepare for winter in New Hampshire. Pause for a moment at that last phrase: "winter in New Hampshire." Unlike "April in Paris" or "autumn in New York" or "springtime in the Rockies," no one has ever written a song titled Winter in New Hampshire. Ever wonder...
...consequence of Rice's turn of phrase here is a remarkably artful handling of sexual scenes. It appears that sleeping with nameless people of both genders is as essential to Armand's becoming a vampire as drinking blood. Armand's coming-of-age becomes a veritable Debbie Does Dallas as he screws his way across Europe. As subtle as Rice is in her sexual descriptions and as cheerfully dirty-minded as I am, however, I'm convinced that it was the baths between Marius and Armand, the sadomasochistic romps and the vampire-mortal orgy that made me put this book...
...title for this collection Opened Ground, seems to imply a new mode for or at least perspective on his work. The phrase "opened ground" appears several times in the anthology, but one of the most important appearances of the phrase comes at the end of "Act of Union," a poem from his most widely-read collection, North...
...heart of the intensely moral matter of choosing a career lies in recognizing the tragedy that the phrase "socially responsible career" embodies--namely, that society is perverse enough to deny the term "career" an inherently socially responsible character. That society affixes the label "socially responsible" to only certain careers implies that some careers are socially irresponsible. As Eldridge Cleaver said, "You're either part of the solution or you're either part of the problem." There is no neutral ground between working for a better world and working against...