Word: writes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Diffrient's chair prompts visionary speculations about the office of the future. Perhaps the executive desk will become obsolete except as a status symbol to sit behind, not to write on. And what of the conference room of tomorrow? How about a congenial grouping of Jefferson lounge chairs, their occupants all watching the displays presented on their individual monitors? -By Wolf Von Eckardt
There was a time when historians laboriously gathered and sifted evidence before beginning to write. The invention of the tape recorder offered a short cut. By pointing a microphone at enough people and asking them to reminisce about something, would-be chroniclers could now simply market their research. Hence oral histories, an important-sounding term for a form with some serious drawbacks. These include impressionism (not what happened but how it felt) and the notorious unreliabilities of memory. The speakers in such books may represent a true cross section of their society at large; they may also have been chosen...
Most American novelists are firmly rooted in the middle class, and when they write about their social betters, they are usually a little uncomfortable, like a stranger at a grand dinner who furtively watches to see which of the many forks the hostess will pick up next. Louis Auchincloss was born to that elevated society, however. He is, as reviewers always note, perhaps the only living example of the novelist of manners,, the last descendant of Henry James and Edith Wharton...
...dozen in the Book Class. He believes that they and their peers had a remarkable and unrecorded influence on New York, and hence America, in the days before women "got sidetracked in the dreary cul-de-sac of men's jobs." He makes it his task to write their history and, through the mechanics of the sometimes awkward plot, persuades nearly every one of them to pour out her heart...
Perhaps. But this sporadically entertaining example reads more like an outline for a novel than a novel itself. Auchincloss may know better than any other practicing writer that rarefied world of old New York money, but he also knows less than many others how to write a vivid story. The trouble is that he tells enough about his subject to make it interesting, but not enough to make it the stuff of memory or dreams. -By Gerald Clarke