Word: plot
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This is a matter both film and book leave ambiguous. Because, in some sense - and I know this is going to sound strange - it is really no more than a plot point, something that plausibly carries us to the matter that, in recent years, has most obsessively concerned Philip Roth. Even his most casual readers know him as our only great erotic novelist, a man who spent his early career both hilariously and heartbreakingly exploring the contortions of the spirit that our sexuality imposes on us. Truly, to borrow the title of an earlier Roth novel, he has been...
...plot of Black and White is engrossing from the get-go. The first murder victim is a much-hated editor who supervised the newspaper's standards of word choice, and who personifies the tyrannical, pretentious side of the Times. (The inside joke here is that the victim, Theodore Ratnoff, is portrayed as a tall and handsome strapping blond, while the real editor of standards, Allan Siegal, was short and heroically rotund.) His body is discovered with a telling item stuck into his chest: a newspaper spike, the symbol of days gone by, when an editor rejecting copy would spike...
...last stop on President Bush's final tour of East Asia before leaving office in January. And while the trip offered opportunities to marvel at China's accomplishments, Bush was focused not on past triumphs, but on present dangers. In Seoul, he met with President Lee Myung Bak to plot the next phase in North Korea's slow-motion nuclear disarmament. In Bangkok, he praised Southeast Asia's economic progress while slamming Burma for human-rights abuses...
...visited by a woman with angel wings tattooed on her back who believes that she and he were lovers in 14th century Germany. She is a psychiatric patient who is also a world-famous sculptor of gargoyles. I would very much like to stop summarizing the plot now. Instead, here is a quote from their inevitable love affair: "A cheese strand dangled from her mouth to the edge of her left nipple, and I wanted to rappel it like a mozzarella commando to storm her lovely breasts." Nurse, is it time for my shot...
...years that Robert Maheu served as the public face of Howard Hughes, he never once met his reclusive and eccentric boss in person. A former operative for both the CIA and the FBI--he notoriously solicited the help of the Mafia in an assassination plot against Fidel Castro--Maheu first came to know Hughes when the famous aviator enlisted his help in spying on an ex-girlfriend...