Word: reader
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...earnest plonkers had written this clumsy, lively, thoroughly entertaining family saga of war and romance, no reader would have puzzled over deep currents that seem unaccountably shallow. Anthony Burgess, however, is one of literature's certified mandarins, known as an explicator of Ulysses (Re Joyce), a postapocalyptic moralist (A Clockwork Orange), and a scholar showily at home in a double handful of ancient and modern languages. He wigwags strenuously at the outset of this new novel that primal, mythic stuff is ahead -- ancient tales threading through the dark, tribal roots of 20th century bloody-mindedness...
Hirsch maintains that reading skills are limited to topics the reader has encountered, so specific information must be drilled into students' heads. He uses the example of standardized reading comprehension tests: "If a young boy knows a lot about snakes but very little about lakes, he will make a good score on a passage about snakes, but a less good score on a passage about lakes....If you know about lakes and snakes, and rakes and cakes, you will have [a high] reading ability...
...Reader, beware. This article is rated PG: Pretty Ghoulish. Or, as Bette Davis' recorded voice advises at the beginning of each Grave Line Tour, "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night...
...opera house. The Paris Opera (Vendome; 187 pages; $75), with text by Martine Kahane, curator of the Opera's library-museum, and musicologist Thierry Beauvert, succinctly recounts the history of the fabled hall, but the real tour d'horizon is provided by Jacques Moatti's photographs, which take the reader from the subterranean lake beneath the mammoth building, where the Phantom of the Opera was said to roam, to the gilded statue of Apollo and his lyre, which soars some 230 ft. above the streets of Paris...
...buys a book on the subject. Then he stays in and writes a book on the subject. Usually, the volume he reads is full of recondite information. Typically, the one with his name on the cover is a model of clarity, making difficult subjects accessible to the common reader...