Word: prose
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sweeten adversity, Shakespeare played up the toad's jeweled eye rather than its warts and bloat. Dr. William Ober, a Boston-born pathologist with an 18th century prose style and a tart Yankee wit, would rather dissect the toad. The eye looks out for itself; the rude and frequently ugly support systems of truth and beauty need all the help they can get. There is, of course, a long history of the artist as freak and invalid: Plato's ideas of divine mania; Philoctetes, the archer of Greek mythology, whose festering wounds made him unfit company; 19th century...
PERHAPS IT IS this hesitancy to generalize, to offer weighty and solemn judgments, that makes Didion's writing so evocative. Instead of pronouncements, she offers reportage. She focuses on an incident and notes every detail in uncluttered, harsh prose. Didion also has the reporter's curiosity about how things work. She investigates how orchids are tended, how freeways are monitored, how lifeguards live, how dams work, the philosophy and history of shopping malls. She is always honest in her examination of a setting or person. She damns through accuracy, not forceful moral argument. In "Bureaucrats," for example, she perfectly captures...
DIED. Theodore M. Bernstein, 74, former assistant managing editor of the New York Times, who served as the paper's prose polisher and syntax surgeon for almost five decades, authoring seven popular texts on English usage and journalism; of cancer; in New York City. In a witty Times house organ called Winners & Sinners, the shirtsleeves vigilante caught solecists in the act and fended off such encroaching verbal vices as the politician's "windy-foggery," Madison Avenue's "addiction" and faddish "hot-rod writing...
...Dirty Harry) never lets an actor go overboard. The same lean quality is visible in his film making. With the help of Bruce Surtees' elegant, metallic-hued cinematography, Siegel makes every point as economically as possible. His style is the visual equivalent of John D. MacDonald's prose, which serves this kind of material well. The tension builds so naturally that neither hokey music or contrived menace is necessary. Only once does Siegel lose control - in a jarringly graphic finger-chopping scene that lit erally and figuratively sticks out like a sore thumb...
...when ahead 30-0 play it safe. Most points are won on errors, not winning shots. Gologor covers a lot of psychological ground: the aggression behind politesse, the times when anger and guilt are useful, the devastating aftereffects of missed opportunities. His courtside manner is casual and unintimidating, his prose free of psycho-jargon. There is, however, a bit too much commercial top spin in the book's title. Sensible Tennis may not be so flashy as Psychodynamic Tennis, but it would be more appropriate...