Word: reader
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...reader today finds it hard to see what seized the imagination of the country in Wilson's earnest novel of postwar listlessness. The prose is bland. The plot devices are those of what used to be called women's magazine fiction. Will Betsy forgive Tom for fathering an illegitimate child in Italy during World War II? Yes. Will a dishonest caretaker succeed in cheating Tom and Betsy out of an inheritance...
...Will a reader, then, believe in salvation-by-adultery when proper Dr. Winters finally thaws with Alexia Reed, 35, who boasts "remarkable reddish-gold hair, green eyes, and a smacking style"? Hardly. But by then there's been a lot of lively conversation about Homer, Proust, Darwin and parenting, and Sicilian temples. Everybody talks just beautifully on Seton's bus. "The answer to the problem of alienation, to the difficulties of building a sense of community," she writes, "may be to put people on buses." It's not a bad way to keep an amiable but wobbling...
Scheer and Rankin's historic bridgework is as skilled as their choice of quotations. Recollected events and human voices carry the reader from the first shots (and words) at Lexington in 1775 to a chorus-like finale at Yorktown. Flashes of humor and high spirits lighten the hardships along the way. Washington (on inflation): "A rat in the shape of a horse is not to be found at this time for less than ?200." A very young officer to his wife, after the battle of Princeton: "Oh, my Susan! It was a glorious day and I would not have...
...white farmhouse down a rutted dirt road and bring him to a desolate cove on Lake Champlain that has changed little since. Benedict Arnold, then a hero still, burned his ships there after holding back the British fleet in the fall of 1776. In Manhattan, Stember can startle a reader with the intelligence that a field where Washington's raggedy men knelt to fire is now the corner of Broadway and 116th Street. Volume III is remarkable in following the often neglected fighting that took place late in the war in the Carolinas, pitting Cornwallis and Banastre Tarleton against...
...Aaron Burr, as well as portraits of some of the American painters for whom they sat. Each personality has a facing page of biography. The faces often encourage long and fascinated scrutiny. The biographies, though they are mostly fashioned of pure cardboard, help a good deal to familiarize the reader with the names and numbers of some of the lesser rebel players in the War of Independence...