Word: sheed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...GOOD WORD AND OTHER WORDS by Wilfrid Sheed Dutton; 300 pages...
...difference between a critic and a reviewer is that a critic can pick his fights. A reviewer must be able to take on anyone in the bar. Wilfrid Sheed is a reviewer, and in his weight class, one of the best in America. He has the good taste to know that glibness is slightly shabby. But in this new volume of analysis and in vective, what he writes about E.B. White's style ("White's notes to the milkman achieve effects that the others sat up all night for") could be said by others about Sheed...
...more volatile subject, Sheed concludes: "At present, most reviews of books by blacks are critically worthless. White reviewers tend to babble ingratiatingly, as if they'd just received a death threat...
Most of these pieces appeared in the New York Times Book Review, for which the reviewer wrote a column, now regrettably defunct, called "The Good Word," or the New York Review of Books. Sheed's opinions seem right most of the time, but not so invariably right as to be insufferable. Too much Tightness shuts off debate and stifles the thought process. Sheed provides a good mixture of wisdom and nonsense, so that the reader finds himself saying, "Yeah, yeah, right," and then, "Now wait a minute!" He is properly appreciative of Edmund Wilson, sound on Walker Percy...
...Sheed dossiers combine straight biographical facts with opinionated, often blunt assessments. And some spice. Pericle Felici, 66, the "ruthless" front-running candidate on the right, is said to use a telephoto lens to monitor Pope Paul's movements about his palace. Another Curia Cardinal, Giuseppe Maria Sensi, is said to be "a lover of fast cars" who currently zips about in a red BMW 3000. In Guatemala, Mario Casariego has been so closely identified with the regime that his automobile is always accompanied by "a radio patrol and two armed motorcycle guards...