Word: reader
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...women, was meant to be possessed." At the beginning of the book DeCrow provides extensive historical background for her theories. Most of this material is not germane to her present subject--today's injustice--because it is concerned with legal practices long dead and buried. DeCrow does spare her reader the oft-used propaganda rhetoric of some "movement" books, but the hesitating, abrupt style and odd organization is at times irritating...
Fortunately for the reader, Jan Morris reads better than Goethe. She writes, in fact, very much like James. Conundrum is a lover's leap removed from those case histories of sexual maladjustment that dish up undigested gobbets of Freud liberally sauced with prurience and self-pity. The book is a brief and graceful, often witty memoir of Morris' inner and outer life. The outer life proceeds from a happy childhood in an artistic upper-class Welsh family (he read Huck Finn, cherished animals, and was taught to "wash my hands before tea"), through years as a choirboy...
Both boys are right-partly. There is quite a bit of baloney in Grandma's book, but along with such things as an especially treacly view of her husband's disposition and career that all but the most ardent Kennedy fans will find hard to swallow, the reader is offered much nourishment. He learns a good deal, for example, about the frail, "funny little boy" who became President; about J.F.K.'s older sister Rosemary, who was retarded from birth; about that conscientious younger brother Bob; about the hard work that marriage demands-even from the very rich...
...Kennedy does not mind actually saying that life is no bowl of cherries. She believes that those with privilege must help those without. She refrains, however, from pushing her own ideas on the reader-yes, even where religion is concerned. The dominant tone is joy and a total rejection of self-pity. "Nobody's ever going to feel sorry for me," Rose murmured to Jacqueline Kennedy after Joe's death...
Thomas De Quincey's mother, who ought to have known one when she saw one, called the infant Thomas Babington Macaulay a "baby genius." From the age of three, "Clever Tom" was a compulsive reader whose idea of a wild childhood game was to act out Homer, reserving for himself the role of Achilles. At six, the future author of the five-volume History of England was at work on a compendium of world history...