Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Unlike Sunday Darwins like Robert Ardrey (African Genesis), Jane van Lawick-Goodall does not press the homosimian parallels or insist that psychocosmic mysteries can be solved by watching a bunch of monkeys in a tree. Yet the parallels are strong, and so is the reader's temptation to see in the chimpanzee a hairy mirror of mankind. A woman as well as a scientist, Jane loves her subjects and makes the reader love them too-not as clever pets but as serious and struggling individuals. All the more painful, then, to be told that throughout Africa chimpanzees are being...
Such bombast raises a problem inherent in all historical novelizing. If Garrett had written a conventional biography of Raleigh-as he is certainly equipped to do-he would have marshaled evidence to support opinions, scrupulously noted where assumption bridged fact and mentioned in rebuttal any important contrary theories. The reader would have been left with a strongly argued view of Raleigh. That is quite different from what is to be found in Death of the Fox. The reader who lacks the specialist's knowledge necessary to see the seams between fact and assumption is robbed of the uncertain historical...
...around page 500 of this novel about Sir Walter Raleigh's last years, the reader is fending off the fine words with his free hand and shouting "Enough!" And yet ... and yet ... (as Novelist Garrett, whose prose is measled with portentous dots, might write) the gaudy style is grounded in intelligence, and it fits the character and the times. Raleigh, the last Elizabethan, had swagger and intelligence in excess. That being so, it was wise of the author to be liberal; excess carefully spooned would be absurd...
...raised up by Garrett is an almost operatic hero. His single weakness is pride, but he is saved from the stiffness of pride by an ironist's self-knowledge. The author manages to make him credible and even more or less persuades the reader to accept such verbal acupuncture as this: "Old it is true. But mark you, sir, I shall never be so old or frail that I could not spit the likes of you on the point of a rapier like a poor sparrow. I would cut you clean from your high beard to your lower...
...mind. The master and slave of this berserk carnival is a psychiatrist named Luke Rhinehart, after the pseudonymous author, whose real name is George Cockcroft. Cockcroft took the hero's name as his pen name "because the book is in part autobiographical and I wanted to force the reader to take the book more seriously than he would a novel." Luke is a square who learns to live by the cube. One night, after a small, drunken party, he resolves that if a die that lies hidden under a playing card has a one facing up, he will rape...