Word: reader
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Andreski is convinced that "much of what passes as scientific study of human behaviour boils down to sorcery," and suggests that the lay reader learn to differentiate between the mumbo jumbo and the occasional work that is valuable. How? By testing his brainpower on a few hard books like Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy and J.H. Woodger's Biological Principles. If these volumes are comprehensible but the work of a particular social scientist seems obscure, "then you can justifiably suspect that it might all be nonsense...
...book. Understandably so. August 1914 is the first of a many-volumed effort by Solzhenitsyn to re-create modern Russian history in truthful fiction. Tannenberg was a decisive battle from which the Czarist regime and the Russian war effort never recovered. But there are moments when the reader, plugging along with the hungry troops or trying to feel the requisite rage at the chicanery of the book's archvillain General Zhilinski, longs for a series of those day-by-day position maps that help make sense of nonfictional accounts...
...Tolstoy's War and Peace with that passion for bearing truthful witness at all costs that has been the center of Solzhenitsyn's own career as a writer. In August 1914, though, Verotyntsev is too busy carrying messages around the battlefield (and from the author to the reader) to seem entirely human...
They do not stir an American reader as they do Solzhenitsyn. The war seems distant. The rhetoric of patriotism is just now justifiably in ill repute. The dramatic scenes are not so dense, driving and personal as they were in Cancer Ward and The First Circle. But the message carries. Solzhenitsyn could be writing of himself when he describes Staff Colonel Verotyntsev's showdown with the generals: "He brought with him, too, that passionate sense of conviction which inspires belief less by its veracity than by its origin in personal suffering...
...produces wonders: "Martin Fogle was growing up, as in the background his aging parents disappeared into their shoes." Slightly nutty, but marvelously accurate; this is exactly what the aging parents of a 15-year-old body builder would do. A bit further on in the same story, the reader learns of Martin's father that "Once an idea occurred to him, he would hold on to it like an umbrella in a high wind." Not so nutty, but definitely skewed, a vision to be proud...