Word: reader
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Otherwise heavily censored, the newspapers carry great numbers of letters from frustrated readers. One complained that there were no electric heaters to be bought in Prague. A smoker lamented that he could buy pipes but not pipe cleaners, which after all are "just a piece of wire with some rough string wound around it." Another reader beefed because the only shoelaces on sale were so coarse and long that they were suitable only "for elephant boots." Still another wondered if the government bureaucracy could not cut back on its quintuplicate forms so that the toilet paper shortage could be alleviated...
...Henderson the Rain King and Herzog observes his age with no excessive charity. Chaos? Yes. Senselessness? Yes. Disintegration and despair? Be the author's guest. The dour view itself is not remarkable. Well-wrought chaos and subtly evoked senselessness have never been in such abundant literary supply. A reader thinks, with varying respect, of Mailer, Heller, Vonnegut, Cheever, Barth...
...like every good jiver, he also has a deep streak of charm, and so does Author Brown. Taking the reader into his confidence in an extraordinary postscript, Brown suggests that the whole book is a jiver's joke. George may be a caricature of the white man's mythical black, the hustling swordsman who alone can bring true satiety to a woman. On the other hand, Brown addresses George in the postscript, too, saying: "You think that your acts have been lies, but you need to realize that your creator is not some white man, but a black...
Sense of Community. Calder ably combines the methods of the journalist, historian, sociologist, researcher, pollster and commentator to tell how it was to be a British civilian in Hitler's war. The cumulative effect is occasionally overwhelming. The innocent bystander (if 25 years' distance makes the reader innocent) picks his way through the human rubble of five ruinous years of war and still wonders how the British managed to "take it." The impression is clear, though, that only a people long nourished by a willingness to "put up with things" and a strong sense of community could have...
...absence of poetics-and heroics -seems appropriate, but the reader is warned that Calder's historic rehash is served up with the left hand. Tories are the villains-for Munich, for building the wrong sort of planes, for sheer Blimpishness. The fact that the Labor Party kept on thinking that it could have peace and disarmament is barely mentioned. Such partisanship ill becomes a study that ends with the Empire overseas liquidated to the tune of 4,000 million pounds sterling, 500,000 dwellings smashed, 355,000 dead (62,000 of them civilians), more rationing looming up, and "with...