Word: reader
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...linguistic philosophy which, from a puritan devotion to clarity, actually makes it very difficult to say anything about anything. Professor Stephen Jervis (and Novelist Mosley with him) struggles against this self-denying ordinance. After all, the intellectual show must go on. This is a novel. It is, the reader is told by one character, not about characters or society, but "about knowing...
Knowing what? Picking up clues or philosophic crumbs like a capriciously fed pigeon, the reader will learn that Stephen is married to a beautiful wife whom he loves, that he has two children, and that he does his job more or less well. He is also 40 years old, has problems of identity, and, more specifically, "can't keep his hands off the girl students." It is not really his hands but his irresponsible voyeurism that is Stephen's trouble...
...found that he was happier when he was back in the trenches. At the Armistice, he discovered that he had so completely identified himself with his battalion that he refused demobilization to spend a year with the Army of Occupation. The experience is so subtly conveyed that the reader is not surprised. Chapman's war is told without bitterness (though with an almighty disdain for the political bunglers and profiteers and civilian patriots who prolonged the agony), and this sets it apart from the more famous Goodbye of Graves or the tone of braggadocio-disguised-as-cynicism that taints...
Clichés in Clutches. To keep the customers interested, Robbins has tried every trick in his carpetbags, which means almost every bizarre sexual practice-plus once in a while a little kissing. Take all that away and the reader is left with an utterly baffling story about pseudopolitical intrigues in a Latin American republic where the peasants are revolting and their leaders disgusting. In the end, the book sinks of its own weight (2 Ibs. 2 oz.) and its excesses: four-letter words that are stuck everywhere like flies on flypaper and clichés that lie in clutches...
...amoral marathon of evolution, it has been fashionable to pity the poor insects for entering a blind alley of biology that mammalry was smart enough to miss. To promote a larger sense of reality, Entomologist Ross E. Hutchins in this unusually competent volume of popular science invites the reader to climb modestly down the Tree of Life and to shinny out on a branch of evolution unimaginably larger and in many respects more fruitful than...