Word: author
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1960
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
RABBIT, RUN, by John Updike. This talented, depressing book contains some of the best and some of the most shocking writing of the year. Its hollow, spineless central character leaves a trail of misery and tragedy in the wake of his weakness, a condition that, the author seems to imply, infects a great many average U.S. young men without the stamina to face the facts of life...
MANI, by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Mani is a desolate Greek district, which modern civilization has not yet touched, whose poverty-stricken people are the descendants of the Spartans and still speak familiarly of Helen of Troy. British Author Fermor describes their way of life and their dramatic, forbidding countryside with a knowledgeability and high style that make Mani the year's best travel book...
...ultimate in barbiturate prose is the point at which tedium becomes coma, and perennially bestselling Author Keyes may have reached this point in The Chess Players. Her great sedative skill can be appreciated only when it is understood that her material, as such, is fascinating. The novel is set in New Orleans and Paris in the 1850s and '60s, contains an amorous princess, various spies and diplomats, a slave auctioneer, lovely Creole maidens, and splendidly uniformed military personnel. The hero is a brilliant, brooding fellow who becomes the world chess champion and then chucks it all for love...
...author has not troubled herself to invent this chess master. Paul Morphy, the only world champion at chess the U.S. has produced, was born in New Orleans in 1837. At ten, he began beating the best players in Louisiana, and at 21 he had beaten the best in the world. A year later he abandoned chess, possibly because the girl he hoped to marry scorned the game. Morphy, as Novelist Keyes resurrects him, is a colorless weakling, whose intellect, despite the fact that everyone thinks him brilliant, is an unfavorable blend of compoop and nincompoop...
...sword fights or seductions. Novelist Keyes's strong point is research, and where Frank Yerby or Taylor Caldwell might liven the soggy chapter by unhooking the heroine's bodice, Morphy's chronicler merely recreates a chess game. While it is open to question how much the author knows about chess, the royal game, it is clear that she is a master of Authors, the game of royalties...