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...grittiest novels of the past few years, is no-exit reality. Richard Price, a film scriptwriter whose much praised first novel was The Wanderers, hung out with drug cops and drug dealers for two years, he says, listening to the talk and watching the action. A white, middle-class reader, from a neighborhood where people don't duck when they see a police car, has no business saying whether Price has got things right. But the book sounds right; it rings true. Cheap wine, the kind you drink on the front steps, is "stoop booze." That's information worth hanging...
What this book brings to the already crowded domain of Hawking lore is a rather successful merger of biography and physics. As it traces the course of Hawking's life, it pauses occasionally to prepare the reader for the mind- boggling complexities of relativity theory and the even more bizarre notions of quantum physics -- twin pillars on which Hawking has constructed his theories -- which he is currently attempting to unite in an all- encompassing theory. The authors characterize their early review of Newton's classical theory of gravitation, for example, as "a gentle workout in the foothills before we head...
...spiritual interior of an African nation struggling to reconcile its traditions with modern dislocations. Sorcerers, ghosts and two-legged dogs mingle with villagers and politicians in this hallucinatory narrative that reconnects Nigeria to its origins. Okri's uncompromising vision and verbal energy carry him swiftly through 500 pages. The reader too moves along, although a little less magic and a bit more realism could have given this extended tour de force more variety and emotional punch...
...resemble each other beyond their shared setting. Wolfe despises his characters and creates them in order to hold them up to ridicule, wriggling and in pain. McInerney cares deeply about the silly, grasping, ego-swollen pipsqueaks -- fairly decent, fairly normal people -- he invents. Wolfe's cold contempt gives the reader distance, a panoramic view of an ant colony. McInerney shows us human beings who feel wretched as they behave badly...
...Terms of Endearment, is big, flabby and aimless. It picks up Terms' Aurora Greenway in her 70s and deals lengthily with the impotence of her 80-year-old lover, who has taken to exposing himself. There's more, equally jokey and unfunny. Before the book's midpoint, the reader asks himself the question that should have occurred to the book's editor: Why am I spending time with these people...