Word: simonizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Visiting Professor of Folklore and American Civilization Simon J. Bronner, on loan from the University of Pennsylvania at Harrisburg, is turning the F&M spotlight closer to home-closer to his home, in fact, in Pennsylvania's Amish Country...
Into this fray comes America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible (Simon & Schuster; $32.50) by noted Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom and his scholar wife Abigail. The couple are the latest in a string of former liberals come round to denounce affirmative action. But unlike more polemical authors, the Thernstroms pin their arguments to seven years of research, modeling their approach on Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 benchmark racial survey, An American Dilemma. Their prose is cool, not overheated, and their 704-page book is stuffed with tables, charts and graphs tracking black progress over the past 60 years...
They are a marvelously mixed lot, variously overweight, uptight, overage and ungraceful, and they are moved by a nice mix of persuasive motives in Simon Beaufoy's unforced script. Director Peter Cattaneo poises their conflict between need and shame lightly but firmly, and his actors--especially Mark Addy, whose Dave struggles touchingly with flab and impotence--achieve a similarly persuasive balance between the comedy and pathos of self-exposure. Will they ultimately dare the full monty (Britspeak for removing their G-strings) at the conclusion of their first show? That's eyes-only information. But to make an unembarrassing movie...
...pathologies of the rich rather than the poor), today's young audiences may find themselves entranced rather than repelled by the movie's upscale ticky-tacky decor and more likely to respond to the sound track's cha-cha lounge music than to its earnest baby-boom lullabies by Simon and Garfunkel. The generation gap has come full circle. Kids today--they'd rather play Rat Pack in Vegas than run off with Katharine Ross on a bus to self-actualizationland. Plastics...
Chris Offutt is a prize-winning short-story writer (Kentucky Straight), and in his tough, funny, sometimes brilliantly written first novel, he can't quite shake the habit. The Good Brother (Simon & Schuster; 317 pages; $23) could not be simpler or more direct in its narrative plan: a good man, Virgil Caudill, caught in a crushing predicament not of his making, commits a murder that seems unavoidable, abandons his home in the Kentucky hill country and survives precariously in Montana. The pages that narrate this contain no misdirection, no writerish word tasting, not even a flashback or shift in point...