Word: tales
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...amazing grace. And the Captain is a typical Greene figure: a man of several names and many shadowy occupations and absences. His enemies are, of course, corrupt officialdom and bourgeois smugness. His story is told by Victor, the boy he says he won at backgammon, or maybe chess -- the tale shifts with the passing years. Along with the wraithlike woman who is the Captain's unlikely grand passion, Victor is the chief beneficiary of a shifty, sometimes shiftless man's redeeming devotion. He is also, in the end, the Captain's unwitting Judas. Greene, 84, wastes not a word...
...election of 1960 has, for some, a numinous glow. The election was the prologue to everything that happened after. It was the American politics before the fall. Its protagonists went on to their high, dramatic fates. Perhaps part of the magic of that race is that we know the tale to its dramatic completion...
THERE is nothing sudden about Suddenly Last Summer. In fact, the play is rather excruciating. Tennessee Williams' awesome drama combines all the horror of a 19th century gothic tale with a 20th century Freudian's worst nightmare...
What elsewhere one sees only in travel brochures, one finds in Thailand daily. It often seems, in fact, as if ancient gods -- Bacchus, Neptune, Zeus and Venus -- conspired to make the land a composite of holidaymakers' fantasies. Here is a never-never land built on solid ground; a fairy-tale monarchy ruled by a Renaissance King and his classically beautiful Queen; an orchid-scented garden of scintillant temples, lush jungles, palmy white beaches and a capital built along tree-shaded canals; and a gentle Buddhist retreat filled with smiling, gracious people who make "tourist industry" sound like a contradiction...
...reconcile science and a universe with meaning, he seems to have reasoned, it will be these scientists. From different disciplines, brilliant and somewhat iconoclastic, the work of all three has focused on meaning and the nature of information. At the heart of the book are their insights, and the tale of how Fredkin, Wilson and Boulding arrived at them, through their scientific work and lives well lived...