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...People really were making the effort to get out and talk to random students they didn't know," she said...
...letter was written during the summer after Tadesse's first year to a Harvard Law School student she picked at random from the phone book...
...surprise that Martin Cruz Smith, author of the Soviet-era Russian cop novel Gorky Park, has written the most interesting and richly textured crime story of the season. What is unexpected about Rose (Random House; 364 pages; $25) is its setting: not the disorder of present-day Russia but the rigidly stratified society of a Welsh coal-mining town toward the end of the 19th century. As must be true in a period thriller, the setting drives the plot and makes the crime--in this case, the disappearance and presumed murder of a young and idealistic clergyman--seem inevitable...
Poetry is autobiography for some writers, transposed memories of voyages both interior and across time's span. Think of Wordsworth, seemingly cursed with total recall, or Whitman with his barbaric yawps about Brooklyn and the Union dead. Or consider Virginia Hamilton Adair, whose Ants on the Melon (Random House; 158 pages; $21) may prove to be the year's finest volume of verse...
David Gordon, however, was a far more complicated case. His daughter's recounting, The Shadow Man (Random House; 274 pages; $24), is well titled; Gordon's shadow was profoundly deceptive. The intellectual who talked of riotous years at Harvard in fact never finished high school. The erudite essayist who had written for the Nation and the Jesuit magazine America was also a literary name dropper and vituperative anti-Semite. The right-wing pamphleteer apparently did write speeches for Senator Joe McCarthy, as he claimed, but the speeches may never have been used. The jaunty, confident head of the family most...