Word: essays
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Although many of these essays demonstrate her obsession with control, The White Album's one major flaw is an interior disorder. Each individual essay is superbly crafted, but together they leave no one coherent impression, no sense of decision about the subjects she treats...
...book resembles what Didion tells us about herself. In the revealing and brilliant title essay, she describes a list of articles she packs when traveling. She meticulously follows the list, but always forgets her watch. She shamefacedly asks people for the time every half hour until she resorts to calling her husband at home. Her passion for asserting control, for putting things--and herself--in order is always foiled...
...same sensitivity and emotional impetuosity that defeat her make her writing so effective. The book's disjointedness is at times a very deliberate reflection of Didion's own reactions to the years she describes. Her first essay, "The White Album," breaks into 15 vignettes; she cuts from image to image, splicing and assembling them. She views the '60s themselves as a series of improvisations on a discarded script, in a passage that reflects the tone of both the era and her book...
...Essay "The Politics of the Box Populi" [June 11], Lance Morrow asks, "What is the political content of Mork & Mindy?"He should realize that even now, Morkese is slipping past the international dubbers into the languages of every tongue and tribe. Today's young viewers may some day meet in the U.N. with a fork-fingered felicitation and a "Nanoo, nanoo...
From the title essay, which deals with the discovery of 19th century Brain Researcher Paul Broca's own brain in a formaldehyde-filled jar in a Paris museum, to his final speculation on out-of-body experiences and life after death, Carl Sagan (The Dragons of Eden) again balances technical expertise with humanistic thinking. The astronomer is not always successful, as when he tries to relate the psychology of the Big Bang to the experience of birth. But he is unassailable on subjects of pure science: the awesome structure of a grain of salt; the strange, hospitable atmosphere...