Word: vivid
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DIED. JOSEPH MITCHELL, 87, writer and journalist; in New York City. In prose both vivid and wry, Mitchell, a New Yorker regular for most of his career, chronicled the city's more unconventional citizens, from workers at the Fulton Fish Market to the Mohawk Indians who toiled as high-altitude construction crews. In 1992 he capped his career with the best-selling Up in the Old Hotel, a compilation of four previous books, including the memorable McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, with its cockeyed gallery of barkeeps, preachers and gypsies...
...Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism (Houghton Mifflin; 445 pages; $27.95). The authors have given us a clear-eyed account of what happened to these luminaries as well as to broadcast journalism in the decades after World War II, in the process drawing a vivid portrait of idealists who believed that "a journalist should be the champion of the underdog," but who were also "intensely ambitious young men who yearned for admission to [the best] clubs and salons..." Cloud and Olson not only recount the broken friendships and broken illusions that saddened the later years...
...capitulation to Hitler; Charles Collingwood, the high-living, womanizing dandy, demonstrating incredible courage during the North Africa campaign. Dominating the story from London is Murrow himself, bringing the Battle of Britain and the Blitz back to an indifferent America, helping shift public opinion from isolationism to interventionism by painting vivid word pictures of ordinary Britons in extraordinary times...
...written about the workings of education committees. Byatt's interests here are more philological than dramatic. All her various plots underscore the mixed blessings of language, its power to obscure as well as reveal, to enslave as well as liberate. The subject is certainly worthy but not perhaps sufficiently vivid to propel readers through a long, long literary haul. Byatt writes beautifully, and passages of this novel come to brilliant life. But the net effect of the whole, as opposed to the parts, seems to be every bit as cacophonous as the original Tower of Babel...
...look back upon a year whose opening days of meeting roommates and hearing Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles warn us to "beware of snow drops"--its meaning today eludes me--are as vivid as Friday's union demonstration, it is difficult not to sit back and try to fill in the gaps...