Word: vivid
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...however, the fact/fiction bipolarity erodes some of the book's brilliance. The reader begins to doubt Morris even when he describes events without resorting to dramatic trickery. His account of Reagan's summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland is so vivid as to make it seem Morris sat with the two leaders. In fact, Morris admits he was not there; he went to Iceland later and, relying on interviews, "enjoyed the scribe's traditional advantage of being able to recollect emotions in tranquility." Morris' brilliant portrait of Teddy Roosevelt's rise to the presidency was of course built from...
...Star Called Henry (Viking; 343 pages; $24.95), Roddy Doyle's new novel about the birth of the modern Irish nation, begins with the vivid miseries of its hero, young Henry Smart, who is named for a dead brother whom his grieving mother can't forget. The time is the turn of the century, a dreary hiatus between a past of colonial starvation and a future of war and revolution. Henry's father, a one-legged Dublin bully-boy who free-lances as the doorman at a brothel, can't support the family, so Henry runs wild, stealing from shopkeepers, sleeping...
...China in 1946. What If? editor Robert Cowley, who also edits MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, says this exercise is no mere parlor game but makes history "come alive." Others might call it pointless, if mildly interesting. The bloody "factuals" of history are vivid enough without foraging into further imaginings...
This speech is one of the darkest and most unsettling in the Potter books to date. It creates a vivid physical embodiment of a painful mental state, which Muggles call depression, and it demonstrates Rowling's considerable emotional range. She can be both genuinely scary and consistently funny, adept at both broad slapstick and allusive puns and wordplay. She appeals to the peanut gallery with such items as Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, a wizard candy that means what it says on its package; it offers every flavor, ranging from chocolate and peppermint to liver and tripe and earwax...
...downright funny, even absurd. Cherub-faced, with a bowl-shaped haircut unsullied by the professional stylist's scissors, he gives off a dual impression of utter youthfulness and uncanny erudition. He uses the word ontology as naturally as other young men say "dude," but he's quite capable of vivid straight talk. Of his idealistic upbringing he says, "There are families that eat hot dogs and families that don't. We were a family that didn't." And his complaint about a tedious party thrown by his publisher to introduce him to New Haven, Conn., bookstore owners sounds...