Word: reader
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...returns from the staleness of the East Coast to Montana, where he has inherited a cattle spread. Here the author novelizes industriously, with small effect. Events occur; characters are brought to life, then enter, speak and exit; but Joe remains a not very interesting puzzle to himself and the reader. Only Montana itself is luminous, and for a few paragraphs here and there McGuane is still a marvelous writer: "The huge cottonwoods along the river had turned purest yellow, and since no wind had come up to disturb the dying leaves, the great trees stood in chandelier brilliance along...
...gods continue to smile on Nicholas Gage, a writer who knows how to tell a good story and, even better, has a good story to tell. His 1983 memoir, Eleni, pulled the reader into the pitiless Greek civil war of the late 1940s, when Communists fought to destroy the royalist government. Gage told how the Reds came to his mountain village to round up children for indoctrination in Albania. His mother resisted and smuggled him and three of his sisters to safety. For her defiance, Eleni was tortured, shot, and her body thrown into a ravine...
Even so, the relative handling of the stories amounts to a blatant rejection of the poetic notion that each time the bell of doom tolls, it tolls for all mankind. The collective news judgment seems to be that each death diminishes the reader in direct proportion to the shared bonds of nationality, ethnicity, religion, type of government and the like. Pointing out this callous calculus seems to do nothing to mitigate it. As Columbia University professor Herbert Gans noted in his 1980 study Deciding What's News, network journalists in the 1960s tried to prick their bosses' consciences by assembling...
...easy to see the intellectualoid underpinnings of Breathed's strip. But they serve only to make "Outland" more irritating. Most of the strips so far have taken the reader through five panels of apparent meaningfulness and then dumped a Dan Quayle joke in the last panel. Either Breathed is a lazy sot or he is trying to prove that Dan Quayle is more of a travesty than even Johnny Carson imagines...
Whiting's book offers an unobstructed knothole through which to view the peculiarities of Japanese baseball and the Americans who struggle to play it. But a larger point also slides home to the reader. If Americans and Japanese cannot see eye to eye on baseball, how can they understand each other on such issues as trade? The answer is evident from this book: they are not yet able...