Word: reader
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...lessons Tuchman offers in The March of Folly, in short, may not be worth the drone of the lecture. Tuchman's enduring virtues have been the clarity and grace of her elegant sentences, spinning out images of the past that took the reader to the scene. In this new enterprise she sometimes seems too much in a hurry to pause for that valuable indulgence. Her dense, rapid-fire synopsis of the siege and fall of Troy is, inexplicably, almost as wooden as the horse. Her enthusiastic expedition into papal territory (where she solemnly scolds, but obviously admires, the ferocious...
...elements of a Ludlum thriller. Usually, the book contains a thrilling array of plot twists that leave you gasping for air. But not this time. Never has the predictability of a Ludlum novel nor the lack of conviction or joy in spinning a good tale hit the reader harder than in his most recent novel. The Aquitaine Progression...
What makes some of his other novels so convincing and wonderfully exhilarating is the way everything is a puzzle, and as the protagonist learns so does the reader. But by the first 150 pages of The Aquitaine Progression we know what the conspiracy is; we know what Converse has to do. The other 500 pages seem more an exercise in how well Ludlum can invent traps for Converse and how much we can believe in his paranoid vision of a corrupt world where anyone can be bought and everyone is being watched. The traps Ludlum invents are singularly unoriginal...
...compiled these letters press clippings and reports into a 712-page book, The File, published in 1982 by Springer-Verlag. In the book's forward Lang urges the reader to use The File's sources to develop new ways of thinking about social issues. The academic quarrels, personal affronts, progress of the Ladd-Lipset survey and illustrations of biased press coverage make The File an exciting, perhaps unique method of examining an issue. Ladd, the campaign's target, even sent along a congratulatory telegram praising the book as "a major literary achievement...
...translation falters: In "Tom Tom II," "a petits pas de pluie de chenilles" translates to "with baby steps like a rain of caterpillars," which not only sounds inane but loses the alliteration and onomatopoeia of the original. The English and French versions are on opposing pages so that the reader can concentrate on one version and refer to the other when necessary...