Word: portraited
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...BRIGHT SHINING LIE by Neil Sheehan (Random House; $24.95). In a riveting portrait, John Paul Vann, a major architect of U.S. policy in Viet Nam, emerges as a man who embodied the contradictions of his ill-fated mission: a courageous do-gooder with a dark streak of amorality...
...clumping boots, locked together in a straining mass like Goya's witches. Both the allegory and the freshness can be found in his first real masterpiece, done in 1858-67 after he got back to Paris from his studies in Rome: The Bellelli Family, that marvelously observed group portrait of his neurotic aunt Laura, her lazy and distracted husband Gennaro and their two daughters. For though it is a tour de force of realist observation -- how much more concrete and present the Bellellis seem to us, surrounded by the furniture and other stuff of their lives, than the people...
...George Bernard Shaw of Michael Holroyd's biography, which takes the playwright up to age 42 in the twilight of the 19th century, hardly seems likely to become one of the most lionized men of the 20th century. Yet this portrait, a dozen years in the making, in the end enhances Shaw's achievements. In place of the glib rhetorician, Holroyd poignantly brings into view the shy, resentful, self-thwarting youth who created the persona of G.B.S. Ashamed of his scandalous and impecunious family, embarrassed by his own awkward ways with peers, employers and especially women, yearning for a position...
...consequence appears to have been able to unearth some new nuggets, although he offers no footnotes and has put off detailing his sources until after publication of his third volume. The advance from Holroyd's British publisher, Chatto & Windus, was about $1 million, surely a record for a pen portrait of a deceased author...
...master at choosing a few physical quirks which quickly sketch a whole range of characteristics. His best moments explore the extent of male folly. His characters are often driven by lust, a drive that they often do not understand or which threatens to overwhelm them. A bombastic portrait of a Married to the Mob type who has just eaten a huge meal is particularly on target. As he advises his nephew Vincent to fall in love, he reminisces about his own youth, when he was a "human hard-on" and "a dick with clothes on." "You don't get married...