Word: sheed
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...WILFRID SHEED...
...Wilfrid Sheed is almost certainly the best American reviewer of books. He is also, as he has shown in Max Jamison and People Will Always Be Kind, a novelist of wit and intelligence. When his prose has erred, it has always been on the side of elegance; he has never been known to write a bad or foolish line...
...Sheed has tried to function both as a desk-bound essayist, considering Ali as a charged particle visible through the tubes and teleprinters of the press, and as a reporter, observing the man in his splendid flesh, talking with him, touching him, telling us what Ali is really like. The worthwhile results might fill a short magazine article. The rest is throat-clearing, padding and prattle. "Why write about Ali? Why paint the Mono Lisa?" Sheed asks aimlessly. And elsewhere: "It was almost as hard to tell how much Ali was really suffering as it is with his fellow Capricorn...
...Although Sheed conveys very well the discomfort of being a white onlooker among Ali's retinue of sullen Black Muslims, he digs up almost nothing new or useful about his subject's past. In fact, he finds that the slick surface Ali now presents to the world is totally impermeable. Far too often he is reduced to saying "by all accounts," "apparently," "I'm told," "seems," and "I would surmise." At his worst, Sheed writes things like "I am told by those who know that being beaten up by a gifted father has a peculiar horror...
...Sheed appears to be unnerved by his own failure, to the extent that even his grammar comes apart. He writes that Ali "learned ... to move side to side from Louis Rodriguez and to lay on the ropes from Sugar Ray ..." "Lay" for "lie" may be a weak paraphrase of fighters' talk, though the context makes this seem unlikely. But a few pages later there is something that would earn an automatic C minus in freshman English: "No one ever looked good wearing out their hands on Chuvalo...