Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...subject seems beyond the interest or knowledge of Berton Roueché. An amateur gourmet, he writes lovingly of bananas, "the humblest fruit," but with their comprehensive range of minerals and protective germ-battling skin, a near perfect food. He delves into history to recount the tale of garlic (the early Greeks and Israelites learned about it from the Egyptians). He waxes more poetic about apples, rejecting the notion that this was the fruit forbidden to Adam and Eve. "The apple-the apple I know, the apple of country cider and the autumn roadside bushel-would be out of character...
Although he uses conventional methods, McEwan produces something well beyond the run of the chill. He meticulously establishes the plausibility of his unlikely tale. The isolation of the house and its inhabitants is crucial: things could not go wrong the way they do in the presence of prying neighbors. Also necessary is a large quantity of cement, an empty trunk in the basement and, later, a sledgehammer. Most important is the question of motivation. Faced with the fact of their mother's corpse and the fear of being dispersed as orphans by the authorities, the children...
...have read them seven or eight times. I am one who holds the Trilogy in a special place of esteem -- you might say I love these books. Not everyone feels this way about Lord of The Rings, but those who criticize the books for being a dull, silly tale or simply nothing special have always been an enigma to me. I simply could not understand why anyone could fail to be as enchanted by Tolkien's world...
...Christina not write her book when her mother was alive to defend herself? "The story was not yet finished," she replies, somewhat disingenuously. "I had no idea how it would end." Many of Joan's friends, some of whom confirm the basic facts of Christina's grim tale, are nonetheless sorry that it ended this way. "I cried when I read the book," says one of them, Screenwriter Leonard Spigelgass. "But I really cried for Joan. There is an absolute nausea among her friends in learning these things...
...together by booze, barbiturates, bitterness, incest and greed. Brennen finally finds the girl (also mysteriously dead) and discovers that the family business is being run by a homosexual Chinatown lawyer and his epicene "nephew." The nephew is quietly siphoning off cash to finance a cocaine-smuggling operation, and the tale moves to a bewildering but believable showdown. His publisher reports that Sausalito-based Zackel is working on a second novel, which on the evidence should be as welcome as San Francisco's cracked-crab season...