Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This is not to claim Sheehan's work useless; she has found, after a grueling and frustrating search (as she describes in an afterword) a woman who allowed her, and, vicariously, the reader, into her home, to observe, to question and to describe. Sheehan is familiar enough to be there when Santana discovers her son is mainlining heroin; but is that so routine that Santana accepts it in stride, without a moan or a whimper even? So it appears from the description the reader is offered...
...NICEST things about What Really Happened is the authors' determination to avoid those easy, slick judgments about their characters. Limiting their own role to descriptions and an occasional musing, they allow the people they present to speak for themselves and about each other, using excerpts from interviews. The reader's view is manipulated subtly, by juxtaposition and choice of adjectives--a pleasant change from Decter's brand of opinionated aggressiveness. The subtlety isn't constant, though; every once in a while they throw in a summing-it-all-up pronouncement that detracts from their overall accomplishment. In the profile...
...remainder of the book documents 16 of her works through detailed descriptive "overviews," scripts of spoken texts, pages of old notebooks, old photographs, and manifestos published in connection with two of the earliest works. It's one of the only books on dance that lets the reader respond to the work as though he had seen it. The hefty volume The Notebooks of Martha Graham, brought out three years ago by Harcourt-Brace-Jovanovitch, certainly does not, and that high-priced publication is the nearest thing to Work...
...stay close to home and learn from their mothers, and, where all of life is carefully and traditionally metered according to an individual's age and experience. And, because this is the history of one man's family, the characters become individuals with whom it is possible for the reader to empathize...
...economic struggle they faced in the post-slavery period, are all episodes which cover a broad range of emotional and factual material, yet Haley describes them with such natural and simple sensitivity that one scene flows smoothly into the next and leaves plenty of time for the reader to absorb all that has transpired...