Word: randomizes
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...latest and one of the funniest of these vengeful academic burlesques is Richard Russo's Straight Man (Random House; 391 pages; $25). Russo, a former professor at Colby College in Maine and author of The Risk Pool and Nobody's Fool, commences his slapstick when William Henry Devereaux Jr., creative-writing teacher and chairman of the English department at an obscure Pennsylvania college, makes a slighting remark about a colleague's poetry. She whacks him across the face with a notebook, and the metal coil hooks his nose...
...reviewing Naomi Wolf's latest treatise, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (Random House; 286 pages; $24), a number of critics have complained that the feminist author writes as a pop-culture illiterate. This is not entirely so, for surely no one else has ever found so much significance in the work of Tony Orlando and Dawn. Early in her book about the ways in which American society still fails to indoctrinate girls into a sexually confident adulthood, Wolf uses the singing group's Knock Three Times--a song about a guy who has a crush on a cute neighbor...
...when brute force is called for, she's ready. Early in her latest adventure, Shadow Woman (Random House; 350 pages; $22), a thug traps her in an elevator at a Las Vegas casino. She feigns ineffectuality, cringes, then breaks his leg and gouges an eye. As she starts to leave, he grabs her ankle hard (his grip "tightening like the jaws of an animal"), and she says to him, "Think. If you drag me back in there alone with you and your broken leg, are things going to get better for you, or worse?" Sweet reason prevails, and he lets...
...learn more about the local Native American culture. And making her a woman "let me see whether I could write about 51% of the population." He has nearly finished another Whitefield novel, he says, and has three more to go on a contract with his publisher. "Then," he says, "Random House will release my children...
...will be clear to anyone, including this reviewer, who knew the author's family when she was a child, models for the fictional characters in Martha McPhee's novel, Bright Angel Time (Random House; 244 pages; $23), were found close to home. Her father, the writer John McPhee, who has written several books on geology, is detectable in lightest disguise as a professor of geology, and the author herself is surely the youngest of several daughters (three in the novel, four in real life), the bemused eight-year-old narrator, Kate...