Word: genius
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Charles de Gaulle once likened him to Mephistopheles. Françoise Giroud, editor in chief of L'Express, said that he was "as gracious as a cactus." The New Yorker's Genêt noted his "cold genius for integrity." Others have described him as an "instrument of precision," as being "passionately lucid," and as "totally lacking in ambition or vanity." Last week Hubert Beuve-Méry stepped down from the job that had made him the object of such attention, if not always affection. At 67-25 years to the day after he founded...
Author Renault, whose specialty is Hellenic myth and culture, has written better disciplined, more absorbing books (The Last of the Wine, The King Must Die). Here she appears to be limited by her slightly blinkered view of Alexander. Granting him his historic virtues-precocity, courage, leadership and tactical genius-she dissembles on the crucial matter of his sexuality. After Achilles and Patroclus, Alexander and Hephaistion (one of his generals) were the best-known best friends of the ancient world. In the novel, however, though the author surrounds her hero with Hephaistion, an overt invert, and a band of other young...
Keyes' fantasy, only slightly improbable, explores the effects of a brain operation that turns a 32-year-old moron into an intellectual genius, but one still plagued by psychic traumas inflicted in childhood. Cast in the form of the protagonist's diary entries, his is one of the most extraordinary books of the decade. Reading it is an amazing educational experience. One gets to understand the learning process, society's attitudes toward the mentally retarded, the difference between intellectual and emotional maturity, and the essence of human dignity. The author shows here a masterly ability to handle sensitive insights, pathos...
...this foolish little book serves only to exalt the greatness of Hamlet, because Hamlet, written in that wonderful time before people put critical labels on things, encompasses all of the theories and a great deal more. When facing a work of genius, criticism can only "take a line": single-out certain elements exalt them, and finally label them as "what the play is about." Unfortunately, many directors are just critics, and love to highlight themes they like at the expense of the work as a whole...
...dollar saying "Here, Bert, and thanks." As a young intellectual, John Lahr is eloquent, too, about his father's final sense that he did not understand the modern world around him. Unfortunately, such moments only emphasize the fact that the book never reaches the secret of the genius that prompted the drunk's gratitude and Lahr's fame. The book does successfully summon up the private Bert Lahr and the backstage world in which he lived, but as his son would probably admit, the best way to know the man through and through...