Word: readers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...University of Chicago. He also finds time to churn out scores of law-review articles, speeches, op-ed pieces and, oh yes, a book or two a year. (His latest: An Affair of State, a scathing account of President Bill Clinton's impeachment woes; and the less reader-friendly The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory.) "Dick is sort of a legendary intellect," says law-school colleague Randal Picker. "He is one of the great legal minds of the 20th century...
...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...
...Instead, there is a miasma of literary criticism and historical analysis: in both genres, Gordimer chooses summary over insight. In References: The Codes of Culturemaking 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...
...great thing about Gordimers fiction has always been her success in stripping away the layers of pretense and denial and dishonesty that are built up around contemporary lives and societies. She shows the reader universal truths that are nonetheless elusive: her talent is to unveil revelation. In the nonfiction in this volume, it is Gordimers practice to reveal truths that are painfully obvious to most anybody. The subtitle of the volume is Notes from Our Century, and Gordimer makes a case study of historical progress out of her native South Africa, taking us from the world of apartheid through redemption...
...Gordimer herself begs pardon, in this collections first essay: nothing I write in such factual pieces will be as true as my fiction. What is appropriately important to her is emotional truth, words that somehow resonate inside the reader. Hemingway used to assure himself that if he could write one true sentence, he was on the right track: it is this kind of truth that is meaningful to the writer of fiction, truth to the spirit. The problem is, this is also the kind of truth that needs to be important to the writer of the kind of nonfiction which...