Word: sinful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first Holy Year took place in 1300, when Pope Boniface VIII decreed a year known as the "Jubilee," after the Old Testament practice in which debts were forgiven every 50th year. In this case, however, the pardon was from penalties incurred through sin. In Catholic belief, the sinner was freed from eternal punishment (hell) through the sacrament of Penance. But temporal punishment (on earth or in purgatory) remained, and it could be removed in full by an indulgence granted to Holy Year pilgrims by the Pope, who controlled an "inexhaustible" treasury of the merits of Christ, Mary and the saints...
...interpretations make many novels sound better than they are. With Ragtime, just the opposite is true. Its lyric tone, fluid structure and vigorous rhythms give it a musical quality that explanation mutes. In Doctorow's hands, the nation's secular fall from grace is no catalogue of sin. no mere tour de force; the novelist has managed to seize the strands of actuality and transform them into a fabulous tale...
...more often, Alvarez's characters simply have nothing to say. Lack of raw imagination is no mortal sin, and there are other things to build novels on. But the sheer vacuousness of this book often verges on self-parody doubly so because the narrator is always there, reading off every inane thought. This from Sam, during fellatio...
...requires something like traffic control to keep the actors from drifting out of rapport with the audience. With the aid of Thomas Skelton's spotlighting, Scott concentrates the focus and heightens the emotional pitch of the play. Its theme comes across with blinding clarity - failure is the only sin Americans will not forgive. And Miller's language, often criticized as pedestrian, has been scoured to spareness since 1949. All in all, a redoubtable revival of a masterwork of the American theater...
...great national goals could be defined by numbers. Because many of our ills - pollution, inflation and unemployment - had to be described statistically, we were inclined to believe that our goals could be described the same way. We began to be threatened by what the New England Puritans called the sin of pride - belief that all our possibilities had already been revealed...