Word: hards
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...decade without a living novelist featured on TIME's cover, he laments). Derbyshire's no fan of liberalism, but his main targets are the utopian fantasies of both parties and the notion that humanity can patch the flaws that led us to this woeful state to begin with. Embracing hard truths would better prepare us for the real world, he writes--and might have helped us avoid the mortgage meltdown to boot. The native Englishman's guiltily enjoyable diatribe makes keen arguments--why do Ivy League schools charge so much when their endowments averaged $1.5 million per undergraduate last year...
...next generation that pays. Eventually the children, in particular Olive's daughter Dorothy, eclipse their parents in both the plot and our sympathies. This makes sense in a novel about a transitional era, but it also makes for a disorienting reading experience. For several hundred pages, it's hard to know which characters most deserve our attention...
...Byatt's story (parts of the novel read like notes for a cultural history), those details are never less than fascinating. Some English soldiers, we learn, named trenches for beloved works of literature - children's books, no less. But by the end of The Children's Book, it's hard to imagine the young men who christened Peter Pan Trench as harboring any illusions about not growing up or sharing Peter's view that "to die will be an awfully big adventure...
Like airplanes and antibiotics, abstract art is one of the defining inventions of the 20th century. But it's hard to say who arrived first at pure abstraction - images with no reference to the visible world - because abstraction is also one of those things, like calculus in the 17th century and photography in the 19th, that germinated in several places at about the same time...
...target of conservatives for his attacks on John McCain during the campaign, his perceived friendliness to Barack Obama and, of course, the Palin jokes. A columnist at the conservative New York Post called for Letterman's immediate firing, and pundit Michelle Malkin said on Fox News, "It's hard not to have a smidge of schadenfreude for somebody who's shown contempt for women in public ... especially over the campaign, and how he's treated Sarah Palin and her family." (Still, post-Palin, Letterman has had his best ratings in years against O'Brien...