Word: robinsons
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...editors: In “Servitude Nation” (Op-ed, Sept. 18), Daniel P. Robinson criticizes efforts by Senators Obama and McCain and the coalition of 114 organizations called ServiceNation to promote voluntary national and community service. Robinson uses a series of “straw-men,” challenging the legality of national service as well as the intent of those who desire to strengthen and grow the service sector. Unfortunately, Robinson recycles many tired and specious arguments. Robinson suggests that we already have enough volunteering available in America. How then can you explain the fact that...
Daniel P. Robinson ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House...
...hard thing to admit to being bored by Marilynne Robinson. She's a tremendous power in American fiction. She's the author of Housekeeping, a transcendently weird, overpoweringly sad book that was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1982, and Gilead, which won it in 2005, almost a quarter-century later. When Robinson writes--as she does in her new novel, Home (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 325 pages)--that the white hair of a sleeping old man is "like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming," her similes are so precise and so beautiful...
Boredom is not the only feeling Home inspires. Awe is another one. As writers go, Robinson is among the superpowered. She moves easily in and out of minds that to a lesser writer would be solid and opaque, evoking their smallest, most intricate emotions with master-level eloquence. But at heart, Home is Jack's book, or it should be, and therein lies the problem. He's charming enough--God knows what the Boughton family did for the 20 years he was gone, since he's the only one in the house who can make a proper joke. He just...
...that Gilead is both idyll and prison to Glory, the birthplace of all her hopes and their tomb. Robert's long, ungraceful dive into death--"Jesus never had to be old," he complains. But the problem of Jack leaves a slackness at the heart of the book, and Robinson never takes it in. Two-thirds of the way through, you're desperate for Jack and Glory to fall into bed together, even if they are brother and sister, just as a gesture of Christian charity toward a reader starved for incident. It's a strange thing for a novel...