Word: realism
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FROM THE WARM, EVERY-NIGHT reality of bed, the wild adventuring can go anywhere: to the fun of a long, jingly poem about a snooty cat, to the soaring fantasy of a ride through the night sky on carousel horses come alive, to the lovingly mapped realism of a Midwestern farm through a season of hay growing. A sampling of this season's best journeys for young readers and listeners...
...should beget peace; through life we should bring more life. Then how can we explain to ourselves the death of Rabin? How can we understand fate's logic, when an assassin slays a man who has abandoned the methods of war, precisely because he has abandoned those methods? Our realism only extends so far--we are willing to accept that good can come out of evil; how much more cruel and intolerable it is to acknowledge that evil comes out of good...
...President--Rabin's mirror image in the Middle East conflict, killed not by his nominal enemies, but by those among his own people who accused him of treachery. Rabin joins the ranks of such men, and that is why his assassination causes such heartsickness. Dwell on the matter, and realism turns to despair--the good get shot, and the evil die in their beds...
Rabin's change of heart was motivated mainly by simple pragmatism. Military rule over the territories would mean endless war, while annexing them wholesale would dilute forever the ethnic character of the Jewish state; a negotiated peace was the only solution. Hard-edged realism was not his only motivation for adopting this approach, however. He also suggested that he preferred it because it was more in keeping with his sense of humanity. In his inaugural speech to the Knesset in July 1992, he argued that it was antithetical to the democratic traditions of the Jews to subjugate another people. Moreover...
...novels. Smilla has a powerful narrative flow; Dreams is a lumpish absurdity that fuddles to a halt after several dozen pages, begins again with new characters and repeats this throat clearing until well past the book's midsection. In these first chapters Hoeg tries something like magic realism, then gives up a promising experiment...