Word: pitilessness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...assembly should dispel several myths that have grown up around Bowles' work. First, spreading his talent wide has not meant that he spread it thin; any short list of the best contemporary American stories should include two or three from this volume. Second, Bowles' reputation as a pitiless chronicler of the bizarre and sadistic is undeserved; many of his stories are unquestionably grotesque, but the impact of this collection is much more complex and humane...
...vignette of the whitebearded Marx trotting obediently on all fours round his London home, ridden by a five-year-old grandson. Marx's strengths and weaknesses are carefully chronicled: the affectionate relationship with his daughters, the Promethean capacity for work, the hopeless improvidence with money, the raging, pitiless hatreds for fellow Socialists who failed to follow his dictates. The least familiar persona is Marx the philanderer. Here he is, at 43, unrestrainedly wooing his 24-year-old cousin during a fund-raising expedition to The Netherlands. Six years later, in 1867, he is passionately reciting poetry to an attractive...
...engrossing psychological pilgrimage that undermines contemporary modish despair. Falconer by John Cheever. The loneliness of prison and memories is the theme of this deeply emotional novel. The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré. The further adventures of George Smiley, Britain's unlikeliest superspy, as well as a pitiless dissection of contemporary moral dilemmas. The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth. In presenting yet another of his Jewish intellectual heroes wrestling with sex and guilt, Roth enhances his reputation as one of the most consistently readable authors now at work. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. In her third...
...great ironies of South Africa that the Afrikaner, now seen as a pitiless persecutor of a black majority, has a history of struggle against oppression. During the 17th and 18th centuries, while the Cape colony was under the control of the Dutch East India Company, the earlier settlers, who by now included German immigrants and French Huguenots seeking religious freedom, were the first to suffer. They were denied land rights and subjected to fines for such offenses as allowing their cattle to stray...
...Portnoy's Complaint and the novels of D.H. Lawrence-and what these books suggest about contemporary sexuality. Her 1964 essay mourning the killing of John F. Kennedy best displays the author's power to summon back events. In the intensity of the national bereavement on that "pitiless weekend," she writes, "Americans moved toward each other, groping for the connection which would dispel loneliness." The hope generated by the Kennedy presidency, as Trilling accurately notes, was "acute and real ... our best educated classes would prefer to forget what they expected of Kennedy...