Word: readerly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Early in Ex Machina: The First Hundred Days, the reader is hit with a surprisingly eerie re-imagining of the post-9/11 World Trade Center: the first tower is gone, replaced with the memorial beacon of light, but the second is still standing...
Montefiore's Stalin, seen with unprecedented intimacy, is a character even stranger, more three-dimensionally mysterious, than the one we have known. A great reader, Stalin once said to the Yugoslav Milovan Djilas, "You have of course read Dostoevsky? Do you see what a complicated thing is man's soul?" Even Dostoevsky could not have invented this Stalin...
...memoir was thrown open to anyone, however young or unimportant. The point was no longer to pack a book with facts about your life (studied here, married there) but to produce a narrative, preferably of the gut-wrenching variety (dropped out here, cheated on her there) with which the reader could connect. The literary sensation of 2000 was another memoir by an unknown?this time, an American journalist named Dave Eggers, who hit it big with a recap of his harrowing childhood called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. All at once, memoir writing became one of those things everybody...
...have his readers made sense of Ved Mehta?and, in doing so, learned something about themselves? In The Red Letters, as in much of Continents of Exile, Mehta's prose is so polished that readers skate smoothly upon it?without ever breaking the surface, falling in, and getting lost in his life. What's missing from these memoirs, oddly enough, is evidence of the traits that define him. As a journalist for the New Yorker, Mehta refused to be limited by his blindness; he traveled on assignments with guides who described how things and people looked, and he insisted...
...Risk is certainly not flawless. Early on, the reader is privy to more details of the terrorist plot than Liz, and things move slowly until she catches up. Liz also has a convenient habit of asking herself bushels of expository questions ("What business could Eastman have been doing with Germans and Arabs and Pakistanis? Who had been killed? And most vitally of all, was there a terror connection?"). But these are quibbles. In a thriller, plot is all and once it gets going, At Risk is never less than compelling. The book was vetted--as was Rimington's first...