Word: simonal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
JANUARY SUN by Richard Stengel; Simon & Schuster; 202 pages...
...becomes the righteous recorder of black rage in the "charnel house" of Soweto, the largest black township created by that apartheid. Alas, the conflict of genealogy and emotion tends to produce more heat than light. In a typical episode, Malan recalls a psychopath who murdered whites with a hammer; Simon Mpungose's story "seemed to unfold like the story of a saint, deeply disturbing in its biblical parallels." This romantic notion of violence feels like a hangover from the '60s, and it has no place in a South Africa that aspires to a place in the community of civilized nations...
DECEPTION by Philip Roth (Simon & Schuster; $18.95). The master deceiver again teases his fans with a fictive fan dance about a writer named Philip who may or may not be having an affair with a married woman who may or may not be a character in a novel in progress. The woman he lives with doesn't buy it, but readers who appreciate first-rate talent will be thoroughly taken...
...must redefine the center. It should be, he says, "the ever changing outcome of a continuing contest among social groups and ideas for the power to define public culture." Besides, he adds, many immigrants arrive committed to U.S. values; that is part of what attracted them. Says Julian Simon, professor of business administration at the University of Maryland: "The life and institutions here shape immigrants and not vice versa. This business about immigrants changing our institutions and our basic ways of life is hogwash. It's nativist scare talk...
...adage holds, that three hit shows can't cure. Actually, not much has been wrong this season anyway. Blockbuster survivors from prior years were joined last fall by four musicals and three plays that all seem securely established, and major new works by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Neil Simon and August Wilson are still to come. But in a five-day span leading into this week, the proverbial three hit shows materialized nonetheless, one after another, gladdening the Great White Way's chronic curmudgeons...