Word: pratt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...went to Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, won a Guggenheim for travel abroad, enjoyed a healthy success this season at Manhattan's Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery. She considers her heads, among other things, a kind of social commentary. "Look at the censored faces in the street," she says. "You can almost see people saying, I'm not going to be caught feeling.' My figures feel right because they're all tied down. They may look frightening at first-after I had done a few, I ran out of my studio. Then I began to see how defenseless...
Mano's narrator is Calvin Beecher Pratt, a timid, fat, white Episcopal priest who leaves a cloistered, scholarly life to take over a crumbling empty church in the imagined Harlem of the 1970s. There Pratt becomes inextricably involved with an anti-white Negro organization called the Horn Power Movement and its dynamic but tormented leader, George Horn Smith. Middleweight champion of the world, orator, professed illiterate and economic genius, Smith is a man possessed of a freakish protuberance-an eleven-inch horn jutting from his forehead...
...Eldridge Cleaver-Smith as a character is most extraordinary for his recognizable human qualities and frailties. Behind Horn Smith's power and hatred there is a person who desperately needs the recognition and sympathy even of a self-consciously inadequate white priest. Yet the fact that Pratt and Smith somehow strike up something that can be construed as friendship is remarkable. The unusual results of their mutual "needs" raise the novel above the level of an otherwise purely allegorical tale of ghetto politics...
...Pratt is subjected to all sorts of torments. He is psychologically humiliated at an anti-white Horn Power demonstration and is badly beaten up by a deranged Episcopal priest, whose own congregation, at Horn's command, has deserted him for Pratt's church. At a floor-by-floor, six-story orgy staged by Horn, Pratt is exposed to blatant homosexuals, naked prostitutes, hallucinatory drugs. Then one of Horn's co-workers and antagonists threatens to blind and castrate him. Finally, the cowering priest is coated with pitch and thrown naked out into the streets. There at last...
...body burned free of all its hair, Pratt's mind verges on madness. Though he has survived these trials, Pratt still lives in fear and trembling of Horn and his apocalyptic world. And in the end, when someone attempts to kill Horn, it is Pratt who tries to protect him. Secluded in the bowels of Pratt's church, where Horn has maintained a secret hideout for years, the two men finally reveal themselves to each other. Pratt has always been a misfit-he says-though he does have the courage to admit his fears and weakness. Horn emerges...