Word: reader
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...does the reader have to join the 8 million-plus U.S. birders to enjoy the nearly 6,000 entries and 1,675 photographs and drawings in this striking tome. Terres wrote all the entries himself, a labor of 21 years, balancing the scientific and the popular, to please novice and expert alike. He updates ornithological subjects like mating. Some findings: scientists now call the hummingbird's brief passion "promiscuous"; birds fly by instinct, not parental instruction; a robin's natural life span can be as long as 11½ years, but its life expectancy, because of power lines...
...refusing an ad, The Crimson is restricting the freedom of choice of its readers. This argument ludicrously--and condescendingly--assumes that the readers of a newspaper receive all their information from it and are helpless without its guidance. Any reader of The Crimson with a desire to subscribe to Screw can do so simply by looking up the magazine's address or phone number and sending it a check. The "freedom of choice" truly endangered in this controversy is that of the thousands of women raped every year, in a society where magazines like Screw have portrayed rape...
...fascinating lives. Most of the bestselling biographies that flood the market fall into the latter categories--loving accounts of tremendously visible figures. People obviously want to know what it was like to be close to a Fred Astaire, or a Marilyn Monroe, or an Arthur Fiedler. But after the reader's curiosity has coaxed the book's price from his wallet, he is likely to come away with the conviction that--yes--what they taught him in Expos makes sense. Unclear organization, general statements, inconsistency and verbosity cripple accounts of even the most interesting lives. In short, a biography...
...telling little about Fiedler. It reveals more about Dickson, as an assistant's grateful tribute to the experience of working with his maestro. Dickson's compendium of reminiscences and moments, a handful of which do seem interesting enough to be memorable, can, given sufficient effort and imagination from the reader, furnish the tools to create the picture of what it was like to know Fiedler and the Pops--but the image remains blurred and ineffective for those without the urge to do-it-yourself...
Labels are a handy and necessary form of compression. How else does a reader remember whether it is Ethiopia or Somalia that is under Soviet and Cuban domination? But labels can mislead. In his new autobiographical Ways of Escape, Graham Greene writes: "I had an idea before I went to Malaya, an idea picked up from an unsympathetic press, of a group of men, the harsh overseers of great capitalist enterprises, intransigent, unconstructive exploiters of native labor, drinking stengah after stengah in the local club, probably in the Somerset Maugham manner making love to each other's wives...