Word: vividness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first striking aspect of O'Nan's novel is his language. I read the first paragraph four times, allowing ample time for the luscious, vivid imagery to soak through my bones. But the intensity of the novel is apparent from the beginning: the heat and weight of the lazy summer mood push the edges and demand release. From the beginning, the reader feels the hidden furnace of madness churning and knows instinctively that, if all is so plodding and weary to start, something dramatic must be brewing...
While the focus of Lost on Earth is on refugees and human migration, the book uses this angle to discuss broader issues in America's post Cold War foreign policy, paint a vivid picture of the horrors and atrocities still present in our supposedly "modern warfare" and convey the hopelessness and frustration of entire societies through the lives of individuals. Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent Mark Fritz succeeds in writing a thoughtful book that should shock the average, complacent American into realizing that a world of incredible human tragedies surround an insulated, peaceful American society...
This gave him the best possible qualification for painting the great and the good. He simply took them at their own valuation, producing vivid epitomes of social standing as he did so. His portrait of Lord Ribblesdale, for instance, remains the definitive image of the late-Victorian equestrian male: superbly grave and self-contained, tall as a tree, and yet with a touch of carelessness in the flare of his buff hunting waistcoat and the dashing arabesque of paint with which, in a single loaded stroke, Sargent conveyed the fold of his breeches--a gesture as assured...
...until decades later, in the age of genetic engineering, would the Promethean power unleashed that day become vivid. But from the beginning, the Watson and Crick story had traces of hubris. As told in Watson's classic memoir, The Double Helix, it was a tale of boundless ambition, impatience with authority and disdain, if not contempt, for received opinion. ("A goodly number of scientists," Watson explained, "are not only narrow-minded and dull but also just stupid.") Yet the Watson and Crick story is also one of sublime harmony, an example, as a colleague put it, of "that marvelous resonance...
...that, of course, is neither Jay's, nor Kureishi's, concern. Instead, Kureishi succeeds in creating a vivid portrait of one particular man's experience with one particular woman--a portrait that bears a striking resemblance to the author's own life. The reader does not have to like Jay for this to be powerful, if not exactly joyous, reading...