Word: reader
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Looking at a newspaper's entertainment page these days a reader might think the whole country had gone (POW! WOW! WHIZ!) comic crazy. Annie is S.R.O. on Broadway, Superman is the highest grossing movie, and prime-time TV looks like one vast kiddieland. The Incredible Hulk is breaking up the furniture, Wonder Woman is bouncing over buildings, Captain America is flexing his muscles, and Spider-Man is crawling up the wall...
...Lewis Thomas' Lives of a Cell and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The book belongs in that company. Like Blake seeing a world in a grain of sand, Professor Janovy discerns universes in the creeks, bogs and fields of the Sandhills country. He makes the reader care for creatures as large as the great blue heron, as small as the inch-long plains killifish, and as obscure as the parasites of the genus Trich-odina that live in the minnow's gills. "Early on," writes Janovy, "the killifish was shown to be not a fish...
Gilliatt seems to have discovered a few of the master's old raiments herself, for the reader is invited to believe in her characters not as authentic personae, but as profound sketches of imaginary people. It is impossible to refuse the invitation. Gilliatt's narrative line is sure, and her antic spirit is unflagging. What is fully drawn and wholly believable, curiously enough, is the great love between the two brothers. If the result is fiction as eccentric as its subjects, no matter. Most current novels err in the direction of stultifying detail and would be better...
...reader should be left to make his own correlations; as the rule goes, "Show, don't tell." The style is occasionally marred by obtrusive Latinate words, self-concious allusions, and a few impossible blunders...
Such questioning deserves more rebuttal than the usual cracks about 20/20 hindsight. Journalists aren't expected to anticipate train wrecks or assassinations. But a simple test of their performance is: Are readers or listeners taken by surprise by events that were foreseeable? The Iran coverage meets this test favorably, in that any well-informed reader for the past year has been told all about riots, corruption, torture and discontent. The press, however, can be faulted, particularly in the earlier stages, for describing the opposition, in the simplicity of news bulletins and snippet coverage on TV, as "an unlikely coalition...