Word: portraits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Historians should step aside for this husband-wife team, he a Wall Street Journal editor, she a novelist. Their treasury of more than 400 epistles renders a more definitive portrait of America's past 99 years than would all the centennial books laid decade to decade. Some entries are moving (Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 letter from a Birmingham, Ala., jail), some comical (fugitive Clyde Barrow's 1934 note to Henry Ford, praising his "dandy" V8 getaway car). They add up to an exceptional bedside companion...
...photographer, the one in Vanity Fair and Details, the new Annie Leibovitz with the pedal to the metal. Look at his portrait of Madonna or Marilyn Manson, right, and it's settled: for extremity, hilarity and high pitch, LaChapelle is the one. So when any given picture is two tons of fun, does it matter that he lacks any gravity? Maybe. Taken in bulk, with the wagging tongues and the thrust butts coming at you on every page, you have to admit to fun fatigue. There are times when you can go over the top and still not get anywhere...
...disillusionment for which there is no Hebraic equivalent. At other times, he writes with a contemporary lyricism that brings to life, however anachronistically, the thoughts and feelings of an ancient people: "what we are actually given to know about God from the Bible itself...is no consistent and harmonious portrait but rather a set of often out-of-focus, and sometimes apparently contradictory, snapshots, action photos from different angles and in different lighting." As the author of his own translations, Kugel pays special attention to issues of philological and linguistic debate and includes detailed notes on his own poetic renderings...
...fashioned rationalistic unbeliever, I have no desire to defend religion or to attack real blasphemy. I leave it to others to argue about the appropriateness of covering a portrait of the Virgin Mary with manure. What horrifies me is the idea that, as Rabelais once put it, to "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law"--the concept that one's own desire is all that matters. I dislike this principle, not because I'm a law-and-order conservative but because it's a philosophy of vanity, and because vanity and happiness are incompatible...
...Miss Ellen," the eminent 89-year-old philanthropist, was the eighth. First was Italian stage actress Eleanora Duse, whose portrait ran on the July 30, 1923, issue. The cover story, a little over one column long (not unusual in those days), noted, "She preferred to make entrances unnoticed in the crowd, suddenly to step forward and carry the play away with the splendor of her fervor...