Word: reader
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JOURNALISM these days is a changing craft. Television, with its on-the-spot and vivid coverage of the biggest news events, has not only eliminated newspaper extras but has made superfluous much old-fashioned "color" writing. (It has affected us too: a reader will find far fewer descriptions in TIME than in the past of heads of state stepping down from planes or getting into their limousines.) But an even greater change has been the public's increasing interest in what were once regarded as distant or complex subjects, and here a weekly magazine has an advantage over...
...reader, told that this is supposed to be a history of the times, is baffled, but finding himself reading about a lonely aristocrat living in a remote Welsh backwater, through an art that is little short of magical, he slowly comes to understand and accept Augustine, with his pacifist, anarchist rationalism, as a type-figure of his English class and generation...
...Hitler's escape, hiding and capture are a tour de force of dreamlike action. Hughes makes totally credible the incredible figure in the stained trench coat, hypnotically making his devil's incantations and stuffing cream puffs in his pockets-an ogre sowing the wind, though only the reader has a foreknowledge of the whirlwind to be reaped...
...World War II and his white mother's destruction of his proud father, he opts out of things so completely that for years the staff of the mental hospital have believed him to be deaf and dumb. His skewed observation of the ward-world is well managed; the reader has a vivid sense both of "the Chief's" sick perceptions and of the reality behind them...
...Torturer. What does it all mean? There is the recurrent Duerrenmatt theme: the uncertainty of justice and the universality of guilt in a world in which "there is only one difference between human beings-that between torturers and tortured." Again there is the relish in operating on the reader without anesthetic. But in The Quarry, Duerrenmatt, who studied philosophy before he became a writer, seems to have added a new spiritual element of hope. A man's dogged, defenseless, hopeless commitment to the pursuit of justice-even, like Barlach's, to the point of sacrificing his own life...