Word: knopf
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...grand theme of Landscape and Memory (Alfred A. Knopf; 652 pages; $40) is the many ways men and women have found myth, meaning and symbols of national character in such natural objects as forests, rivers and mountains. Consider, for example, the Alps. To sobersided moderns, these vast, snowy protuberances are no more than vertically enhanced scenery--awesome to be sure, but devoid of greater meaning. Earlier generations were more impressionable. As proof that the mountains were possessed by the devil, the learned physicist and mathematician Johann Jacob Scheuchzer in 1702 compiled an encyclopedic list of dragon sightings in the Alps...
...Knopf; 414 pages; $24) is something of a runaway hog itself, a 10,000-acre comic novel set in what might almost be called Animal Farm State...
Hence, American Tabloid (Knopf; 576 pages; $25). One month after publication, the novel is in its fourth printing and is creeping up the best-seller lists. It has attracted favorable, though sometimes nervous, reviews, understandably so. Recommending a book like American Tabloid--and there is no other book quite like American Tabloid-is most safely done to close friends, whose tastes and tolerances are familiar. Where do they stand on wall-to-wall violence? What is their position on over-the-top sleaze and the reduction of nearly all human conduct to the narrow, insistent lust of self-interest? Pushing...
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley's campus satire (Knopf; 414 pages; $24) is centered on Moo U, a huge Midwestern agricultural college where professors are funded by "Mid-America Pork By-Products," an inventor moos after suffering a "brain attack" and secretaries sell Amway products by telephone. "As jaunty and straightforward as its title, 'Moo' allows Smiley to turn literary and stylistic cartwheels all around the gym," saysTIME critic Pico Iyer. "It is rather like one of those comic novels in which John Updike gives himself a holiday from more draining work...
...Newt, the Washington evoked in Alan Brinkley's masterly The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (Alfred A. Knopf; 371 pages; $27.50) seems like another planet. In the late 1930s and '40s, the word liberal was a badge of honor, not an epithet. Federal officials castigated "economic royalists," denounced predatory monopolists and seemed to regard the words free enterprise as a cloak for corporate exploitation. Big Business, not Big Government, was seen by Americans as the source of economic injustice...