Word: reader
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...only does the brief 13-page epilogue not meet the historical standards Levine presents in the rest of the book, it leaves the reader with an uneasy feeling that the whole historical excursion has been designed to encourage you to feel greater cultural tolerance. No doubt this is a worthy goal. But it seems Levine is on firmer ground when he presents the details of an integrated culture, and the ugly process whereby culture was used to divide people. When he presumes to discuss our current cultural problems, his approach seems as flawed as reading a book through the lens...
Aside from these current issues, most of Bundy's book addresses the high-level decisions that led to the present global nuclear situation. His explanations are thorough and readily accessable to the uninformed reader. From Roosevelt and Truman's earliest decisions to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bundy challenges old and recent theories answering the why and how of these events...
...much is dished up, not on the table manners involved. But the rules change markedly when it comes to autobiographies by the lesser known. Everybody, after all, has a life story, and the reluctance to spend money and time on a relative stranger's is considerable. This, the wary reader is likely to mutter, had better be good...
Mighty events pass quickly; 40 years of calamitous European history slide by as a diverting panorama. No character is on view long enough to be irksome, or for the reader to wonder unduly at arbitrary choices of personal traits and adventures assigned by the author. Burgess, as always, throws in bits of the many languages he knows, mostly untranslated. But where the invented Russian- English slang in Clockwork Orange had a brilliant sting to it (horrorshow from horosho, meaning good, and lewdies from lyudi, people), the phrases here in Russian and Latin appear, after a dash to the dictionary...
...narrative does a complicated backbend, for instance, in order to refer to a Russian restaurant in London named "the Sutky (so called because it was open day and night)." This comes at a point weighty with literary allusions to Crime and Punishment, so the reader suspects hidden meanings and looks up sutky. No allusions here; all it means is "a day and a night." Marvelous; now we know another Russian word. Perhaps the scraps in Welsh, Turkish, Greek and Hebrew offer magical insights, perhaps not. The suspicion is that they are simply authentic sound effects. You skip them...