Word: reader
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Certainly none of Donald's readers will be surprised by Lincoln's victory in the 1860 presidential election, the outbreak of civil war or by the assassination of Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth. The facts of Lincoln's life have been drummed into us from grammar school onwards. What may surprise the reader is Lincoln's active sense of humor, physical strength and youthful spirit and vigor...
Donald's scholarship is excellent; hardly a paragraph is without a quote from Lincoln or a contemporary of Lincoln's who dealt closely with him. However Donald's emphasis on documentation makes it difficult for the reader to forget, even momentarily, that this a historical biography. The reader never feels really inside the President's world and sharing what the president experiences...
Atwood offers the reader little real solace through these confrontations with death. She retreats instead to the realm of imagination. The speaker in "Morning in the Burned House," the final poem in the collection, revels in the bizarre, hallucinatory state between life and death, imagined as a peaceful yet disquieting domestic scene...
Morrow's memories draw the reader in from the start. "A heart attack feels like this," he writes. "A sickness suddenly surrounds the lungs, a sort of toxic interior glow--fleeting at first, lightly slithering, but returning a moment later, more insistent...Something dangerous has come inside and will not leave." As he lies in a coronary-care unit awaiting his bypass operation, Morrow begins to relate his own medical predicament to events in the outside world: "My mind went wandering about, working as a kind of journalist of memory and anger. I sought to connect my inner world...
...essayist, one of America's finest, though a rather more pedestrian novelist and playwright. His memoir lacks the sharp, confident voice of his essays, while the characters, like those in his novels and plays, often come across as wooden and two dimensional. He complains over and over to the reader of his frayed memory, his disinclination to look backward, his lack of a diary (he relies altogether too much on other people's memoirs instead). As a result, Palimpsest has a kind of haphazard feel, with the present frequently intruding upon the past in a way that distracts from...