Word: john
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This year's biggest selling album, "Pope John Paul II Sings at Sacrosong," with its cheerful tunes and bright singing, could enfuse even the Ayatollah Khomeini with the Christmas spirit. But while the album is beautifully packaged and perfect as a Christmas gift and momento of this year's papal visit, the title is deceiving--the Pope hardly sings at all. In fact, he doesn't sing once on the entire second side. It's hard not to fell cheated, especially since God only knows where the profits...
...John Irving, a best-selling novelist, read the fifth chapter of his fifth novel, "The Hotel New Hampshire," to a crowd of about 150 at Adams House last night...
Letters, By John Barth. (Putnam, $16.95): John Barth's endless epistolary novel takes five of the author's old characters and one new one and sets them to writing letters, usually not to each other but to dead people, themselves, imaginary characters, or the author. The letters go on forever through 700 pages, and though Barth's details follow an intricately laid-out pattern, there seems to be very little point to it all. Barth's writing remains contortedly witty, and alone gives Letters some value, but Barth might have shown some regard or consideration for his readers and restrained...
...Right Stuff By Tom Wolfe. (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $12.95): Remember Project Mercury? Gus Grissom? John Glenn? Tom Wolfe's passionate chronicle of America's entry into the space age, The Right Stuff, brings back the memories--or introduces the subject--of the time when America braced for the Soviet threat from the sky and celebrated the heroes who fought that intergalactic cold war. More than that, Wolfe describes the code by which these men lived, the hell-raising, ass-kicking, flag-waving brotherhood of The Right Stuff. It's an exuberant and satisfying look at previously unexplored territory...
...John Rawls, Cowles Professor of Philosophy, consulted his wife before deciding that he wanted his grown children, scattered around the country, to come home for the holidays...