Word: authorization
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...Martinique the author has an audience with one of the island's aging aristocrats, an enchantress whose piano playing attracts an exotic group of listeners: green, scarlet and lavender chameleons. Abandoned on a Connecticut country road, Capote meets a widow who shelters him in her cottage and shows him a freezer full of dead cats, old pets she could not bear to part with. Two policemen wait at a Los Angeles airport boarding gate to arrest Capote for ignoring a subpoena to testify in a murder case he had researched. The situation looks hopeless until he runs into Pearl...
...auspicious opening was a difficult act to follow, and many Farmerites wondered whether the Riverworld was wide enough to sustain a projected tetralogy. The author's next works allayed all fears. The Fabulous Riverboat gives Burton some delightful traveling companions. He and the grownup Alice Liddell Hargreaves (child model for Lewis Carroll's Alice) meet a cynical fellow named Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who constructs a side-wheel steamer to voyage upriver. The second volume also introduces Cyrano de Bergerac and England's King John, who attempted to steal the throne from his brother Richard in real life...
...stay untied. But along the way, Farmer offers his audience a wide-screed adventure that never fails to provoke, amuse and educate. Students of religion will find an impressive comprehension of the Judaic, Christian and Islamic ideas of the after life. History buffs should be diverted by the author's ability to mix notables, from Baron von Richthofen to U.S. Grant, like grains of sand in an hourglass. The greatest beneficiaries should be science fiction fans. For too long they have filled their shelves with charmless fantasies and technical jargon that talks to itself...
Even so, the author deserves close attention. If he is not quite the figure Critic Leslie Fiedler once described as "The greatest science fiction writer ever," his imagination is certainly of the first rank. And if his prodigious saga falters, it is only after four volumes, when the journey has already provided a library's worth of merriment and insight. "In skating over thin ice," wrote Emerson, "our safety is in our speed." Until the final stretch, Farmer's velocity is breathtaking. -Peter Stoler
Simple, direct and suffused with melancholy, the poems were carried into the trenches of World War I by thousands of "lads," few of whom knew anything of the author-just as the poet wished. A Cambridge don who shunned any mention of his verse, Housman hid behind a late-Victorian mask of colorless propriety. The flamboyant London literary scene of the turn of the century left him cold. "He was like an absconding cashier," recalled Max Beerbohm. "We certainly wished he would abscond...