Word: afterword
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This is not to claim Sheehan's work useless; she has found, after a grueling and frustrating search (as she describes in an afterword) a woman who allowed her, and, vicariously, the reader, into her home, to observe, to question and to describe. Sheehan is familiar enough to be there when Santana discovers her son is mainlining heroin; but is that so routine that Santana accepts it in stride, without a moan or a whimper even? So it appears from the description the reader is offered...
...milk at bedtime, cozily oblivious to the ground glass of her ironies and tough-mindedness. Perhaps only a Janeite would be capable of completing Sanditon-and this version is certainly a skillful pastiche-but at the same time, perhaps only a Janeite could so invert its value. In an afterword, the Other Lady praises Austen for the elegant escapism she provides from "the shoddy values and cheap garishness...
...that of the classic first-generation immigrant who loves America because he doesn't want to leave it. Nabokov has left it, still loves it. He feels very sensitive, he says in Strong Opinions, about his lack of a natural vocabulary. He echoes what he said in the afterword to Lolita: My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom, my rich, infinitely rich and docile Russian tongue, for a second-rate brand of English. He feels caught between Russian, for which he no longer...
Oberdorfer is better at chronicling the litany of futility that was Tet than at analyzing its historical meaning. In a personal afterword, he offers the now conventional wisdom that everybody lost in Viet Nam, and that the U.S. never did understand its foe. He predicts that ultimately "it will be a Vietnamese solution and we will probably never understand how it was reached." By then, he says, "Americans will have lost all interest in the outcome and will wonder why so many of our young men died so far away for a cause so few could name." One doubts that...
...behavior of men in extremis, be it in prison, in a cancer ward or, as in this case, at the battle front. The author describes the new work, the first volume of a projected trilogy, as "the main task of my life," and notes with regret in an afterword: "Now that I am on my way to the goal, I am afraid it is too late. I may not have time and creative imagination left for this 20-year work." Solzhenitsyn focuses on eleven days during the Czarist army's disastrous East Prussian campaign. He sees this period...