Word: 1920s
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...eludes me how I'm able to make things come alive," Furst says, then launches into an excited tour of the "astonishingly eccentric" range of research, random and planned, that brings such authenticity to his crepuscular world: the vanity bio of a 1920s Lithuanian, the essays of French photographer Brassai, old Paris Baedekers, and so on. He constantly makes notes of telling details: the cabaret performer with a red light bulb at his crotch that Furst once spotted in a book by Cyrus Sulzberger turns up in Kingdom...
...margins at relevant moments. This type of attention to the details of story-telling--of organizing her scholarship in accordance with the demands of her narrative--helps create the sense of a remarkably unified and cohesive story. The literary cosmos that was New York during and after the 1920s comes alive in both Bernard's careful selections of and introductions to the letters, and it expands suggestively into the footnotes...
...Bernard's main short-comings, it seems, stem from her most impressive achievements. Indeed, having so thoroughly placed this relationship within the context of the New York literary scene of the 1920s in the introduction, she then leaves the reader wondering where this correspondence fits within the context of each writer as correspondent in general: Was this a unique relationship to either writer? Are the themes and concerns discussed in these letters echoed in other correspondences? It would be interesting to consider how these issues played out in the larger story of the Harlem Renaissance. The questions raised...
...Richard Atkinson, cognitive psychologist, testing expert and, since 1995, president of the University of California, the SAT has always been a mystery. What, exactly, does it measure? The original exam, developed in the 1920s, was designed to predict how well students would do in college. The Educational Testing Service, which develops the test, insists it still does. But Atkinson, 71, is worried about the growing number of parents pouring thousands of dollars into SAT-prep programs (last year an estimated 150,000 students paid more than $100 million for coaching) and even shopping around for psychologists to certify that their...
...remarkable ability to inhabit imaginatively other places and times, to render the feel of manufacturing ink sticks in the 1920s or running from the invading Japanese in the 1930s, LuLing's closing words are, the author says, a close transcription of something her own mother, late in life, said to her. "That's exactly what a child wants to hear," Tan says, "and what I as an adult needed to hear from my mother...