Word: readers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...published letters are answered at scholarly length in the column. For a reader inquiring about the uses of leisure, Adler paraphrased Aristotle: "Business or toil is merely utilitarian. It is necessary, but it does not enrich or ennoble a human life. Leisure, in contrast, consists of all those activities by which a man grows morally, intellectually and spiritually." Asked to define justice, he quoted Justinian-"Render to each his due"-and Mortimer J. Adler-"Treat equals equally and unequals unequally in proportion to their inequality." Occasionally, Adler is stumped by a reader's question...
...gradually, with the nagging suspense of a husband discovering a wife's infidelity from scattered clues, the reader realizes that Joan is not what she seems to be. She is, in fact, glibly promiscuous, invulnerable in her amorality. After a fashion, she has a code, and as she spells out its principles the reader will recognize in them the authentic touch of countless other Joans: any mistake is instantly righted if only one admits having made it; promiscuity is permissible if only it is covered with the illusion of being in love. In short, Joan is "a girl...
...well as a novelist (he is an associate editor of TIME), has an unerring eye for the Manhattan landscape, a faithful ear for the speech of the superficially smart. Although he never preaches, and the explicit statement of his theme never rises above the pitch of party talk, the reader is not allowed to forget the book's title; it would be a different story if any of the characters really had a notion...
Author Wilson keeps nudging the reader into the conviction that there has been a death somewhere in the British family; Wilson is obviously still trying to identify the corpse and sort out the suspects. Despite this essentially sad preoccupation, he is pure comedian with a mimic's malice, a gent's outfitter's eye for the socially off-base, and an eavesdropper's avidity for the give-away phrase. Wilson is a first-rate caricaturist whose stature increases as he diminishes others...
Author Biely is a crafty storyteller who can keep a reader flipping the pages while whipping up an intellectual storm. As he describes St. Petersburg in 1905; it is a city where icy water licks morose granite foundations. In prose that seems jittery at first, then calculated, Biely moves from a fashionable masquerade ball to the roach-ridden headquarters of the revolutionary gang; he works the weather and the face of the chaotic city into his story so firmly that at last they seem as important and ominous as any character in the book. When the bomb finally goes...