Word: saints
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...critic Elizabeth Hardwick's Herman Melville. Atlas' original notion--short biographies by great writers--may have been tinged with a little inspired hyperbole, but as general editor he has overseen the production of short biographies (roughly 200 pages each) by some very good writers indeed, including Garry Wills (on Saint Augustine), Larry McMurtry (on Crazy Horse) and Mary Gordon (on Joan of Arc). All the authors were paid advances from $50,000 to $100,000, and those who expressed a desire to choose their subjects were often told to go ahead...
...Saint Augustine is a permanent concern of mine," says Wills. "He has been my hero and favorite writer and thinker since college. I had been looking for the opportunity to write a short life." Gordon recalls Atlas' phone call asking her if she'd be interested in contributing a Penguin Lives volume: "It was as if a lightning bolt hit me. I said, 'Yes, I'd like to do Joan of Arc.' I've been really fascinated by her since I was a little girl." Although she was teaching at Barnard College and working on a novel, she does...
...both the journalist's errors and the utopian's projections. I have been rereading Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s "A Thousand Days," which comprises more than a thousand pages about the Kennedy White House, written in the year after JFK's assassination. In his grief, Schlesinger portrayed Kennedy as saint and martyr: "He was a Harvard man, a naval hero, an Irishman, a politician, a bon vivant, a man of unusual intelligence, charm, wit and ambition, 'debonair and brilliant and brave,' but his deeper meaning was still in process of crystallization." In recent decades, a more thorough and honest parsing...
...rating, until the network cut the screen time for Mapplethorpe's haunting, sexually explicit photos. If only it had shown them longer--for 90 minutes, say--and ditched the rest of this mechanical, insultingly didactic placard. James Woods begins playing besieged Cincinnati museum director Dennis Barrie less as a saint than a fish-out-of-SoHo aesthete. But the nuance is soon lost in a film that wants to be an agitprop documentary, interrupting its storyline with interviews of mostly pro-Mapplethorpe notables. The film isn't obligated to be neutral, but it's so bullying and one-sided that...
...challenge for LVMH will be to squeeze more revenue out of its new, high-priced brands while retaining the luxe quality for which those brands are renowned. The specter of overlicensing haunts the fashion industry today, just as it did in the 1970s, when designers Pierre Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent weren't paying attention to where their names appeared and let their logos turn up everywhere, from discount pharmacies to five-and-tens...