Word: sagas
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...narrator of this breezy, anecdotal saga is no Portnoy, and it's easy to forget that any complaint was ever made, because the irony is irony with an option -- it is camp in the best sense, convincing enough to let the reader drop the bemused distance at will. The storyteller is a "fella name a' Smith; first name a' Word." Word Smith is a sagacious, grizzled and altogether senile old sportswriter with a penchant for alliteration and a lively obsession for the American idiomatic phrase. In the heyday of baseball -- the twenties, the thirties, the forties -- Smitty had written...
...developed a style of history which demands literary excellence and imagination and Starr has both. It is a style which is narrative rather than analytical; the author's analysis is implied in and intuited from his selection and presentation of materials. It reads like an epic poem, like a saga of heroes, and it means to evoke a feeling of continuity: movement forward along not always logical but inevitable lines. In that way it imparts a life and meaning to the past that no bare analysis is capable of. The book itself becomes part of our cultural heritage...
This is a vigorous, thoroughly entertaining revival of Clare Boothe Luce's saucy 1936 saga of bare-knuckled Eves. Interestingly enough, the play is something of a rarity in terms of the U.S. theater's comic tradition in recent decades. We have grown accustomed to kooky comedy, sight-and-gag comedy, situation comedy and even black comedy. But Mrs. Luce writes social comedy...
...view of human motivation with the literary techniques developed in his earlier work. He divides his story in half, changes narrators in midstream and works endless transformations of style. Preoccupied with technique, he fails to provide enough information to create even the most casual sympathy. The most sophisticated campaign saga, after all, is a failure if the reader doesn't care who wins the election...
...CRAZIES is the latest effort of George A. Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead. That ghoulish little saga of resurrected flesh-eaters stalking western Pennsylvania has been horrifying eager audiences at midnight shows for two years now; it even received a special screening at the Museum of Modern Art. Romero operates out of Pittsburgh, making his films on the cheap. Rather like Skinflick Impresario Russ Meyer, Romero edits his scenes into short blurts, which gives them a certain spurious energy. His scripts, which hover dangerously close to illiteracy, contain outrageously pedestrian dialogue, mostly shouted. ("Get Dr. Brookmyre...