Word: readers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...what she always calls the "liberation movement." Her fiction exposes the bleeding heart of South African society, and her eye is precise and unflinching. This is not to say that her fiction is nakedly ideological: rather, it speaks complex truths about human relationships and social realities. It shocks the reader with its honesty...
...truisms rather than incisive commentary. Of course, in two or three of these selections, we do get some flashes of the uncompromising clarity of moral vision that is apparent in her best fiction: but these glimpses of Gordimer at her best only serve in this context to accentuate the reader's disappointment in the rest of the compilation. In 1959: What is Apartheid?, a transcript of a seminar given in Washington DC, we see the Gordimer who we know and admire. Her prose rings pure and true, like good crystal: simple and clear, but heavy with a kind of unexpected...
...Instead, there is a miasma of literary criticism and historical analysis: in both genres, Gordimer chooses summary over insight. In References: The Codes of Culture making fun of the title would be shooting fish in a barrel we come to the hardly surprising realization that There is no generic reader, out there; in Our Century, Gordimer is a long distance from shocking us with the information that The mushroom cloud still hangs over us, and the unbearably trite corollary question: will it be there as a bequest to the new century...
...HSPH's news releases often deal directly with ways in which people can stay healthy--far easier for the average newspaper reader to understand than the growth of T cells in mice...
...inexorable, beautiful and sometimes malevolent caprices of the tides provide structure to Raban's solo trip by sailboat from Seattle to Alaska. He is less sure-footed discussing the forested shores than the channels, but, swept along, the reader scarcely notices, as Raban mixes the tributaries of his own experience, accounts of early explorers and the myths of coastal natives. His masterly book becomes a surging current that spins off eddies in which the strands of the narrative converge. At first dazzling and droll, these whirlpools deepen and darken until, in a heartbreaking conclusion, Raban finds himself captured...