Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...young man writes a virtuoso novel, and the reader, hearing this news, imagines what it might be: a blare of grand attitudes and romantic bosh perhaps, or a bravura display of cynicism not quite fully baked or fully earned. But the mood of Erik Fosnes Hansen's remarkable Psalm at Journey's End (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 371 pages; $24), published in its original Norwegian six years ago, when the author was 25, is dreamlike, elegiac stillness, a condition not usually thought of as youthful...
...tale aboard the Titanic in April 1912, when the great liner made its first and last voyage. On a starry night, aloft on a waveless ocean, the ship is seen steaming serenely toward New York City at 22 knots. In scene after scene Hansen describes an eerie quiet: the reader feels no sense of doom or foreboding. Wireless warnings of icebergs are received, without alarm...
This is not to say the books are interchangeable. Klein, a contributor to Vanity Fair, uses that magazine's patented "I was there" narrative style to great effect. An acquaintance of Jackie's in the 1980s, Klein offers a reader vivid glimpses of her, as well as poignant descriptions of how she would ask Kennedy allies, such as former Connecticut Governor Abraham Ribicoff and press secretary Pierre Salinger, to talk to John and Caroline about their father...
...observation widely acknowledged that a billionaire knows the price of everything but not always its value. The judicious reader will doubtless recall from Volume I Mr. Ross Perot's 1992 pursuit of the nation's highest office, when he precipitately and mystifyingly withdrew, before once again re-entering in October and garnering 19% of the vote. Volume II begins as our protagonist, after spending months of coy obfuscation and many millions creating his perhaps inaptly named Reform Party, declares his intentions forthrightly to his amiable megaphone, Mr. Larry King, but not before luring one hapless Coloradan by the name...
...author knows this killing ground well, but too often his writing is fast and sloppy. A burning department store is "engulfed in its death throes," and streets are "rivers of flame." Rosso, at a difficult moment, thinks "the buck stops here." No, the reader reflects, it was Harry Truman who thought that. Rosso needs a dialogue coach, and his author, alas for what otherwise is an effective novel, needs treatment for tin-ear disease...