Word: prose
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Haviaras brings to his prose the lucidity and exactness of a poet's disciplined eye. A poet pares away extraneous matter, down to the bone, distilling order out of confusion...
...Valentin Pikul. The book is a canny mix of fact and rumor about the monk, whose skill in doctoring the Tsarina's sick son gained him inordinate influence over the royal family in the final decade of the Russian empire. By prudish Soviet standards, Pikul's empurpled prose is downright lurid. In one key scene, for example, Rasputin sneaks up to the Tsarina as she prays for her hemophiliac son. Out of the shadows steps the "bony peasant, his face framed by long hair parted in the center and glistening with oil, his eyes emitting a kind...
...theory of natural selection, just as there will always be a shadowy web surrounding the real Charles Darwin," writes Eiseley. But as anyone who reads his book will realize, Eiseley has come closer than anyone else to solving that mystery and breaking that web. In graceful, occasionally poetic prose, he shows how Darwin, who was initially timid about advancing his theory, was almost beaten into print by Alfred Russel Wallace, a younger, all but unknown researcher. After discussion, the two agreed to announce their theory simultaneously. Eiseley also outlines Darwin's relationship with Charles Lyell, whose research established modern...
Even so, those who feel that twelve scholarly essays on Frankenstein are eleven too many may be half right. A fascinating subject is nearly buried in sepulchral dithering. True, the essayists are earnest and erudite, and their prose is rarely worse than that required to win the fellowships and respect of academe. But the capital offenses are all here: the preening citations of the obvious: "In the film The Bride of Frankenstein, as Albert LaValley reminds us, Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley and the monstrous bride . . ."; the fancy notion among professors that authors and characters " articulate" rather than speak...
Newman's hard-sell tactics have turned off some of the patrons who are most knowledgeable about the arts. His prose can be flamboyant or plain trashy. He once billed Cavalleria Rusticana as "hot-blooded romance, illicit love and violent vengeance, Sicilian style." But Newman is a superflack, not a philistine. He wants to make culture a pervasive American institution...