Word: readings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...simplest moral of this quiet, affecting novel might be: Don't Read Tolstoy. John Strickland, 40, is a successful London barrister who casually picks up The Death of Ivan Ilych during an August retreat at the home of his wife's parents. The lawyer finds himself deeply rattled by the Tolstoy hero's mounting despair, especially by the question Ilych asks himself: "Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done?" Querying himself in the same manner, Strickland realizes that he loathes his career, the expensive trappings of his upper-middle-class existence...
Such mid-life crises threaten to become as much a cliché in literature as they are in life. Yet Piers Paul Read, 38, puts a lot of his native English on this familiar pitch. He knows, as most chroniclers of Me Decade shenanigans do not, that private acts have public consequences; in the great tradition of British novelists, he draws society as a delicate, vast spider web, tuned to vibrate at the lightest footfall or breath of scandal. In addition, Read is a self-described "serious Catholic" and scales this novel to dimensions familiar to readers of Graham Greene...
...Married Man coasts over this pothole in its plot because of its cushion of intelligence and moral fastidiousness. Author Read is best known in the U.S. as the author of Alive, a nonfiction account of how some Uruguayan survivors of a plane crash in the Andes resorted to cannibalism to survive; his six previous novels, far less sensational, deserve more readers than they have received, and his latest may be his best. No one now writing has achieved quite the same equipoise between malaise and morality, ideas and emotions. In this tale of human imperfectibility, the devil gets...
...back in 1961, young Jim Gabler came home from high school in Hawkins, Texas, and told his parents that he was bothered by his history textbook. When his father, Mel, read the book, Our Nation's Story, he was more than bothered; he was outraged. In a chapter on the U.S. Constitution, the book puffed up the powers of the Federal Government but minimized states' rights. Recalls Gabler: "It was teaching that Washington has complete dictatorial power...
...censors," argues Mel, adding, "only people with authority can censor." The Gablers simply make their views available to school board members and concerned parents, Norma explains. "They could read the books themselves but for us to read them will save hundreds of hours of time. If you don't read them line by line, you miss the most deadly or damaging content...