Word: witnesses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WHAT prevents the book from becoming unbearably tedious is its sharp wit. There are moments in the book when the readers laugh aloud: a seven-year-old who chainsmokes steals the change he is supposed to be counting; a lisping grade-schooler is cured after doctors find "a button, a staple, a postage stamp and two buffalo nickels" in his stomach; a heated school election eventually degenerates into a food riot...
...book has merits apart from its wit. Shields uses imagery well and has mastered setting and dialogue, though he occasionally lapses into the cliched. Undeniably, he does have a nice turn of phrase, especially in his satire...
Taking up the narrative with his return to the U.S., Kennan allows his wit to twinkle. California reminds him "of the popular American Protestant concept of heaven: there is always a reasonable flow of new arrivals; one meets many -- not all -- of one's friends . . . and the newcomer is slightly disconcerted to realize that now -- the devil having been banished and virtue being triumphant -- nothing terribly interesting can ever happen again...
...with them. Thus, as Ec 10 would have taught me if I had ever decided to take it, this great demand must result in a very high cost. The marketplace would accomodate this demand by raising prices, for example, but Harvard has a far more exacting scheme: to wit, the comp...
This is the semester's last Schoolyar Talk Tune in next semester for more sports wit and wisdom...