Word: sagas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts is the saga of a cynical writer of a newspaper agony column who is sucked into emotional involvements with his correspondents and almost against his will achieves a kind of faith. Author Wilfrid Sheed's funny, sad, perceptive novel turns the story upside down. It recounts the fate of a magazine writer who starts with a serene, uncluttered faith and, as it slips away from him, tries desperately to become a cynical hack...
...facts tell the bitter and damnable truth" about the British appeasement of Hitler before World War II. The facts are the same old ones, but the authors dress them up more shockingly than ever. Their story is a disgusting one, a history of miscalculation and misdirection. But if the saga of Chamberlain and his cohorts is frightening, so is the shoddy reasoning and judgment of the authors...
...SAGA OF WESTERN MAN (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Fredric March portrays Christopher Columbus...
...less a sacrifice of principle than an admission of fallibility") seem absurd; and the important documentary of Dr. Eisenhower's personal involvement in the Tractors for Freedom Committee disappears as another inessential anecdore. To call the work political science is to misrepresent it. It is more accurately the saga of an American diplomat whose yankee charm shows clearly through his narrative's numberless personal stories...
...panoramic saga of this kind tends to break down into images, episodes and historic tableaux. Act I is devoted more to atmosphere scenting than soul shaking. However, Albert Finney achieves one powerful revelatory moment. He breaks from the company of his chanting fellow monks with his body arched in contortion, his mouth twisted and strangulated with epileptic sounds, the seeming bearer of some supernatural vision or message that he cannot articulate. After that, it is difficult to think of Luther except as possessed, obsessed, and intoxicated...