Word: yarns
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...play golf so he could get a tan, and next they escorted him to dinner with the CIA's director Bill Casey, whose fly was unbuttoned. Reagan doubled up with laughter. So did the free world, the people Moscow was trying to impress with that hilarious yarn...
These and other parallel narratives, including a surprising love story, all involve birth and death and the human population's impact on the world. Yet Chadwick never lets any message overtake the needs of telling an exiting yarn. Instead, he uses ingenious dramatic irony to explore an issue's nuance. For example, L.A.'s traffic jams, just one result of over-population, become a frequent motif in The Human Dilemma. One scene has Concrete, stuck in a steamy gridlock, leaping to the rescue of someone caught in a dangerous road rage incident. But, in the first of several missed chances...
...When I was a boy," says the yarn-spinning champion of St. Paul, Minn., "the storyteller in our family was uncle Lew Powell, who was my great uncle, my grandma's brother, who died only a couple of years ago, at the age of 93. In a family that tended to be a little withdrawn, taciturn, my uncle Lew was the friendliest. He had been a salesman, and he liked to drive around and drop in on people. He would converse, ask how we were doing in school, but there would be a point when he would get launched...
...late E.B. White, the essayist of The New Yorker who wrote so memorably of rural Maine. This is high company, but one additional comparison is beginning to be made. Keillor has sometimes performed in a white suit, perhaps with comparison aforethought, and so, of course, did that illustrious Midwestern yarn spinner and lecture-hall tiger Mark Twain. What some say now is that another major humorist is loose in the nation's ticklish midsection and that Keillor's storytelling approaches the quality of Twain...
...provides some lustrous little essays on royal dandies, polyester, loafers and the making of Harris Tweed, which is still turned out by hand, in the Outer Hebrides. The weavers have resisted most new technology, he reports, although they have given up their time-honored method of preparing the yarn for dyeing. Chemicals have replaced urine as the preparation of choice...