Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and screenwriter Tom Stoppard have made an interesting attempt to put Vladimir Nabokov's novel Despair on film. Anyone who has read the book might think that reconceiving the story in cinematic terms would be impossible--the tale relies on the reader's acceptance or disbelief of the first-person narrator's word. But Stoppard's conception is genius; only the delivery falls short of the mark...
Wojtyla is tireless, sometimes putting in 20-hour days, and known as a voracious reader. He is fluent in Latin, Italian, English, French and German, as well as Polish. Not Russian? Said a priest in his entourage when asked that question last week: "No Pole speaks Russian?but everyone understands it." A flip-up desk allows him to write while being driven in his car. He has a disconcerting habit of reading or writing while carrying on a conversation?and then displaying total recall of what was said...
...book. The dialogue is rich and raunchy, often delightful. And the reader wants so much to believe that Brown's right: that women knew how to love each other before 1968, that female solidarity is not an invention of the Millets and Morgans. The problem is with the writing itself...
Brown uses painfully obvious devices to fill the reader in on past events. Out of nowhere, a character remarks: "Did they ever prove that Cassius Rife killed Cora's father?" One of the cast marries a Japanese man. He is apparently the only Japanese in town. No explanation is given of how he got there. When World War II breaks out, we hear that his wife bashes a Fed over the head with an umbrella when they come to take him away to an internment camp. He reappears later in the book, casually, and again no explanation is given...
...this is biography written by the Washington equivalent of a drinking buddy of the subject. And the book's credibility is cut still further when, in a passage set in the early '60s, the author suddenly enters the picture, standing at poolside at Hickory Hill. And once the reader learns that he was pushed in, fully clothed, by Mo Udall's wife, the image of Schlesinger as scholar is suddenly transformed to the image of Schlesinger as hanger-on, as Kennedy groupie...