Word: tone
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...story on Reagan showed his boundless determination and tough tone toward the presidency, and gave me even more confidence in our next President...
...apologize for Shakespeare, but that is precisely what Jonathan Miller does at the beginning of this play, the 13th in the BBC's Shakespeare series. The Taming of the Shrew is sexist, he says, but it was, after all, written almost 400 years ago. Miller's patronizing tone may explain the flaw of this otherwise worthy production: it is not fun. The scenery is stunning, the direction fine, and Sarah Badel and John Cleese are engaging as Katharina and Petruchio, the shrew and her tamer. But more might have been expected of Miller, who showed his lively...
...something wrong with it, the short story of the past decade might be said to suffer from a tendency toward perfection. Talented writers keep popping up in the few magazines that still publish fiction. The technical level is high; yet the values that make a good story-compression, subtle tone and a microsurgical eye-strike many readers as too precious and inhospitable. One can inhabit a rambling, modern novel; the short story of the '70s seems like an impersonal waiting room full of disparate patients...
...taking an unblinking look through the files of a psychiatric social worker. The Dead, her contribution to Prize Stories of the Seventies, follows a neurasthenic woman writer named Ilena through a declining marriage, a feverish love affair and literary success. The first line, taken off a pillbox, sets the tone: "Useful in acute and chronic depression, where accompanied by anxiety, insomnia, agitation; psychoneurotic states manifested by tension, apprehension, fatigue." The story has the quality of an intense case study with cultural footnotes. Some are ironic: "Newly divorced, she had felt virginal again, years younger, truly childlike and American. Beginning again...
Fallaci has shown strengths as the grand inquisitor of such disparate leaders as Henry Kissinger and the Ayatullah Khomeini. Here she assumes her customary tone of moral outrage, but the hero, a deceased Greek revolutionary, is as unpromising in death as he was thwarted in life. The owlish collector of excesses is soon faced with an embarrassment of riches-and sometimes just with an embarrassment. For connoisseurs of melodrama there is the first meeting of narrator and martyr: "You were to have many faces, many names ... you were a Vietcong girl... You told me about a god with a yellow...