Word: may
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...take, a pregnant girl who feels life stir within her, a teacher hiding his homosexuality. "The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from now he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this moment he has them in the palm of his hand. The silence in the shabby church is deafening because everybody is listening to it. Everybody is listening including himself. Everybody knows the kind of things he has told them...
...typical Read sermon may begin with a quote from Humpty-Dumpty to Alice and turn on some apt lines from Samuel Johnson or Shakespeare as it wrestles with a timeless (but contemporary) problem using the perspectives of the Bible. "Scholarly content is terribly important," Read says, "but it shouldn't intrude." Read's material is solid enough to make him one of the few preachers whose collected sermons can be read as literature-and at the same time enjoy a respectable sale in book form...
...London to the shadow of the Berlin Wall, Smiley battles Karla as masters play chess by mail, visualizing the opponent, pondering alternatives, waiting agonizing days for the next move. And herein lie the novel's aggravating weaknesses. Readers have been here long, long ago. Smiley, the cerebral sleuth, may be as corpulent as Nero Wolfe, but in this adventure he is suddenly Sherlock Holmes redivivus. His obsessive enemy is a new version of Dr. Moriarty. The audience is Watson, condemned to wonder what the detective is up to when he examines those cigarettes and whom he sees in that...
...lapses. But Le Carre is not any other spy novelist. Throughout, he is aware not only of the moral squalor that can attend espionage - but also of Auden's ironic observation: "We are left alone with our day, and the tune is short and/ History to the defeated/ May say Alas but cannot help or pardon...
...Read is best known in the U.S. as the author of Alive, a nonfiction account of how some Uruguayan survivors of a plane crash in the Andes resorted to cannibalism to survive; his six previous novels, far less sensational, deserve more readers than they have received, and his latest may be his best. No one now writing has achieved quite the same equipoise between malaise and morality, ideas and emotions. In this tale of human imperfectibility, the devil gets his due and not a scintilla more. - Paul Gray