Word: roth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Quietly Determined. The U.S., meanwhile, was more immediately concerned about the export subsidies, which could put an added strain on its own trade position by increasing the flow of French goods into the country. As a result said William M. Roth, President Johnson's special representative for trade negotiations, the U.S. stood ready to "protect its interests" by imposing countervailing duties on French imports. Both American tariff law and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade provide for such duties; essentially they are designed to increase the cost of imports to offset government subsidies paid on products by exporting...
...school honor student from Newark, first in his law-school class, and now assistant human-rights commissioner in New York City. At first glance, the chronicle of Portnoy's pain, rooted as it is in Jewishness and the urban environment, may appear to have only specialized appeal, but Roth gives it a universality that reaches beyond ethnic boundaries. It is a coda of rage and savagely honest self-lashing reminiscent of the performances of the late Lenny Bruce. No detail is varnished, no lust or act nice-Nellied as Portnoy complains, clowns and laments in his desperate efforts...
Groucho as Oedipus. Roth sees Portnoy's life as "a masochistic extravaganza," and no one is more aware of this than Portnoy himself. In one of his many hysterical bursts of insight, he cries that he is "torn by desires that are repugnant to my conscience, and a conscience repugnant to my desires." He views himself as the victim in a grim Jewish joke. "Doctor, Doctor," he pleads, "please. I can't live any more in a world given all its meaning and dimension by some vulgar nightclub clown. By some-some black humorist! Because that...
...sternum. But his is a tragedy in which Oedipus is played by Groucho Marx. Mother Portnoy is a vibrant orange-haired vision who has never given up trying to smother her son in the warm pudding of her ample bosom. She surpasses the grotesque stereotype simply because Roth plays her absolutely straight, making her totally and comically unconscious of the unconscious...
...success of Roth's monologues rests not on the author's familiarity with this kind of sociology, but on the fact that few writers of his generation can match his ability to perceive and record manners and minutiae, or equal him in relating life's inner tumult to its outward appearances of order...