Word: reader
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...persistent is the plight of small children in Home Truths that the reader may fairly guess at some trauma glimpsed or experienced during the author's childhood in Montreal. In Orphans' Progress, for example, two wretched little girls are locked up in a French-Canadian convent school. Eight-year-old Mildred and twelve-year-old Cathie are bathed every two weeks, the one wearing a rubber apron and the other a muslin shift so they cannot see their own bodies. The state of Mildred's thumb tells it all: "Sucked white, (it) was taped to the palm of her hand...
...with a sense of self-preservation would have executed an about-face and turned home," he chidingly writes of Paul Flatters, who led the first and second expeditions. As it happens, Flatters is cut down by the Tuareg four pages later. Porch knew it would happen the reader whew it would happen-the chapter is, duh, called "The Massacre" -but how could Flatters have known it without Porch's convenient historical hindsight? Still Porch's wry and occasionally snide writing makes for good reading and that' more important than scholarly reserve in pop history...
...explanation of sources, some of his anecdotes about the peccadilloes of the famous seem too bad to be true. Beguiling as gossip, Rader's book has none of the inclusiveness or gravamen of Spoto's tome. But it has one crucial advantage: Rader genuinely liked Williams, and the reader can understand...
Bradbury is only one of several well-known authors who are collaborating with computer software companies in adapting their novels to "interactive fiction," an electronic form of literature that transforms the reader into an active participant in the plot. A version of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is available in interactive form on a floppy disk (Telarium; $39.95). Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man) has actually created a software work from scratch: Amazon (Telarium; $39.95), which transports the player and a sidekick parrot named Paco into the jungles of South America in search of a lost...
Throughout the book, Adler persistently pulls both modern philosophy and the reader back to immutable human rights and moral responsibilities as defined in classic philosophy. He has no patience with any suggestion that these truths may be simply old opinions. "If philosophy were mere opinion," he writes, "there would be no philosophical mistakes." The fact that his own Great Books program at Britannica is chockablock with the works of Locke, Hume, Darwin and the others is, to Adler, no mistake at all. "It is important to know errors," he says. "A full understanding of truth is to understand the errors...