Word: plot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...left at the dead drop. Cleverly concealed inside were espionage instructions, miniature cameras, Soviet currency and gold. Most damning were two ampuls of a deadly poison. Peterson was charged with passing them to a Russian contact who allegedly had used the same poison in an earlier CIA plot to kill an innocent...
...even if Breslin were in top form, which he isn't here, he would not be able to prevent the book from degenerating into a schlockish cops-and-robbers duel. Given the format--the authors were free to create interesting personalities for their fictionalized characters, but most of the plot was determined by Berkowitz's actions--and the purpose of the book--which was apparently to make lots of money--the authors had little freedom. What starts out as a penetrating portrait of the middle-class tragedy that was Berkowitz's first murder, of necessity turns into a fast-paced...
...contemplate how little imagination has gone into this effort. The rudimentary plot is set forth in a gee-whiz script that stops at nothing, including the invocation of prayers, in its pursuit of the cornball. The obligatory beach-riot scene is a crude recapitulation of the one staged by Spielberg three years ago. Instead of presenting fleshed-out characters (and actors like Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss to play them), Jaws 2 is largely populated by nubile teenagers who appear to be graduates of the Mickey Mouse Club of Dramatic Arts. When these kids meet their unsavory fates, one feels...
...menace blows. Novelist Buckley finds the world more ambiguous. His new espionage thriller stars the Buckley-like hero Blackford Oakes. He is the same CIA man of the author's previous novel, Saving the Queen. The time of Stained Glass is 1952, the place West Germany; the plot backlights Buckley's faith in Western culture and his embattled vision of its decline in an age of nuclear realism and détente...
Handke refuses to embroider this minimal plot in any of the usual ways. Marianne does not ruminate in an interesting or even terribly coherent manner about her situation. Other characters tell her that she may come to a bad end but do not say why. There is no fancy writing to divert the eye or the mind. Translator Ralph Manheim captures an English equivalent of Handke's German prose: dry, simple and spare, as if the author were trying to strip language of as much resonance as possible. Even forward momentum is thwarted; the story is chopped into segments...