Word: sisterly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Marshall Loeb, managing editor of our sister publication Fortune, where Godshall once handled the circulation job, thinks the word circulation is particularly suitable to describe the size of a magazine's readership. "Circulation is the lifeblood of a magazine and as good an indicator as you'll get of its vitality. It's also an indication of the intelligence of the circulator." His opinion of circulator Godshall: "absolutely terrific...
...sulkier or more hostile than the next kid, suddenly goes septic and gets himself into hideous trouble. The cops, in fact, think he has bludgeoned his pregnant girlfriend to death with a car jack. It becomes clear to his parents (who knew nothing about the girlfriend) and younger sister that he is probably guilty, though when he is caught after several days, he refuses to say a word. The lawyer they hire isn't encouraging. Local peasants mutter and look sullen...
...lies combatively for his son; and Judith, a bright, somewhat withdrawn girl who even before the crime was troubled by her brother's unruly sexuality. But too much care, too much measuring, give the novel a somewhat mechanical quality that prevents it from being first rate. Parents and sister are complex and believable, but seem chosen from a casting service for the way they balance one another -- she the idealistic scientist, he the passionate artist, the second child just the right age and sex to be most wounded. And the murder itself, though it could have happened, is kept...
Jacob, unlike his parents and sister, rarely appears as more than a sketched figure. He seems not to have a life, but merely a function: to set off the family torment, so the author can take notes. Carolyn dutifully worries now and then about how the parents of the dead girl are feeling, but mostly the troubled family's misery is airless. The legal and psychological entanglement seems oddly phantasmagorical, lacking independent reality. As an expression of parental dread, of being trapped and unable to help one's children in a situation of vaguely defined horror, the fears are vivid...
...Such as Sister Act. Waiting for Whoopi's dangerous-to-your-health mouth to fulminate is the main plot element -- no, the sole plot element -- of this Disney no-brainer, one of those renegade-hides-out-with-cute -nuns movies that + Hollywood makes every three years. So Sister Act (which has grossed $125 million to date) has a touch of class it doesn't really deserve. So do Clara's Heart, Jumpin' Jack Flash and Ghost (for which Goldberg got the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, though she is firm in announcing that she's an actor, and never mind...