Word: reader
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...tremendous financial interests of publishers have buttressed emotional commitments to the meaning method, says Chall. She quotes one editor who estimates the cost of one beginning reader series at "probably within the range of 10 to 20 million dollars...
Though he has been connected with various universities, he is no convinced academic. The writing of a poem, he thinks, implies a one-to-one relationship between poet and reader, and he is distrustful of group studies of poetry "where the poem is laid up on the seminar table like a dead cat for dissection, all with a great steaming-up of academic glasses...
Dispassionately, he records that social and intellectual snobbery was her worst defect, and he notes with a stranger's eye "a streak of incongruous archness in her humor which is almost ladylike and very disconcerting." Woolf mentions friendships, but the reader feels no warmth. He writes most affectionately of a marmoset named Mitz (the gift of a Rothschild), which rode on his shoulder on a tour of Hitler's Germany. The monkey stole the show and distracted the Brownshirts from Woolf's culpable Jewishness...
...recent writing. If MacDonald can be said to have any thematic obsession (and high art and obsession have been known to keep close company) it is the family: its tensions, its distorting cruelty, and its strange dignity. In each of these long concluding sequences Archer, and through him the reader, must witness at length the inexorable working-out of old guilts and old loves...
...reader could ask no better intermediary. It is the character of Archer itself which is the finest of MacDonald's accomplishments. Isolated, guilty, constantly compromised by the nature of his work and the demands of personal and professional survival, he labors not to change a world or any corner of it, but to preserve something of his own integrity and decency. Lew Archer is a natural successor to Hammett's jaded Continental Op and Chandler's cynical knight-errant, Philip Marlowe, but his problems and solutions are far closer to us and the business of living...