Word: splendid
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...portrait of his father, in his happy prime and then in sad decline, is fascinating and moving. "When he made you laugh," Amis writes, "he sometimes made you laugh--not continuously, but punctually--for the rest of your life." How fortunate that this son is, like his father, a splendid writer...
...miles offshore by a dive team sponsored by novelist Clive Cussler (Raise the Titanic!) in 1995, the Hunley's remains will be hoisted from their muddy grave, if all goes well, in the next few weeks and eventually displayed at the Charleston Museum. That will not only be a splendid feat of underwater salvage but may also offer Civil War buffs an answer to what happened on that fateful night 136 years...
...Auden wrote a splendid poem called "1 September 1939," which, in the original version, he ended with the line, "We must love another, or die." He expunged the line in later editions, judging, rightly, that it rang false, sentimental. I do not think it is the business of the law to tell us, "We must love one another, or else." Nor is it the business of law to forbid us to hate one another...
...Library of Congress bicentennial exhibit of Jefferson's books and writings offers a splendid display of the vastness and the complexities of the man. The complexity begins, of course, with the central contradiction: prophet of freedom, owner of slaves. You see in his own hand the journal entry deploring the removal from the Declaration of Independence, at the insistence of Georgia and South Carolina, of the clause condemning African slavery. You recall the famous line regarding slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just...
Still, Boss Cupid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 111 pages; $22) offers a splendid introduction for the uninitiated. Almost all of Gunn's virtues are on display here: his playful metrical dexterity, his unflinching celebration both of beauty and of its transience. The subject of love crops up repeatedly in the book's 60 lyrics, but the Boss Cupid of the title is not the chubby winged cherub of popular lore. He is something of a hooligan, "devious master of our bodies," wreaker of joy and havoc: "Love makes the cuckoo heave its foster-siblings/Out of the nest, to spatter...