Word: reader
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...itself -- but in its execution. For in trying to pay equal respect to the demands of truth and fiction, Safire strands his novel in a no-man's-land between concrete facts and illuminating imagination. He recognizes this dilemma and tries to pass it off as a virtue: "The reader of any historical novel asks, 'How much of this is true?' " But many readers surely have more urgent questions, such as "How much of this is vivid and interesting?" or "Why should I turn the page...
...last passengers left it. Both Ms. van Wingerden's articles, and the editorial piece, "Harvard, Have You Forgotten About PBH?" written by Jeffrey S. Nordhaus (August 7), contain numerous factual errors, which demonstrate the irresponsibility of The Crimson's reporting. In van Wingerden's articles she repeatedly gives the reader the impression that passengers only escaped from the bus seconds before it became a flaming inferno. Van Wingerden writes that "fire engulfed the vehicle" and it "burst into flames," both exaggerated descriptions that give a false impression of the danger the children were in. Van Wingerden's investigative techniques...
Dorothy Herrmann's recent biography, S.J. Perelman: A Life, points out what any sensible reader already knows: humorists are not a sunny breed. They pick up their tribulations by the wrong end, and that provokes mirth. But after the audience leaves, the anguish remains. Perelman's boon companion and brother- in-law, Novelist Nathanael West (Miss Lonelyhearts), died young (36) in a car crash. Perelman never fully recovered from the blow, nor did his wife Laura, who descended into alcoholism. Many of his best letters deal obliquely with the disappointments he felt with his family and his work...
...obviously meant to provoke serious debate. But when it leaves the theoretical and lands on the practical, it executes a pratfall. Hirsch and two academic colleagues offer a 64-page appendix of references that constitutes their version of vital information. They never do get around to telling the reader that Brownian motion is a random movement of microscopic particles suspended in liquids or gases, that Walter Pater said we should burn with a hard gemlike flame and that comme il faut means proper. They are too busy moving their curriculum between the trendy and the arbitrary. Why, for example...
...much so that it strikes us with the force of something new. But its most important function is to link his work with two currently disused narrative traditions. One is that of the naturalistic novel, which insists on locating characters within a detailed rendering of their world, forcing the reader to recognize that the seemingly minor incidents of life reveal the workings of vast, elemental forces. The other, astonishingly enough, is Greek drama, in which the psychological intimacy among characters is irrelevant, since their destinies are determined by the workings of blind fate. Though naturalism is the controlling mode...