Word: subjection
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1980
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...course, for America's foremost contemporary reporter-turned-essayist, Joan Didion. When Didion undertakes a character profile -- her piece on James Pike, the Episcopalian Bishop of California, for example -- she doesn't begin with the subject, his family, philosophy, or even a recitation of his favorite food (as did Janet Flanner in a 1936 profile of Adolph Hitler). Rather, Didion begins the piece with a word about her own recollection of Pike's church, and then characteristically proceeds to lace the narrative with what she calls elsewhere, "always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable 'I.'" "The greatest study of Mann is Mann...
...writer at twenty. I worked like a dog, choosing each word.") Hoagland's style is consonant with the idea that the essay is a variety of "conversational writing." Unshackled, Hoagland converses recklessly, wildly, an abundance of critical detail and blinding enthusiasm fueling his abrupt transitions from present to past, subject to self, city to countryside. As Hoagland charges about from topic to reflection to stylistic glissando, we find, as observed critic Geoffrey Wolff, that "it is impossible to know (but easy to feel) what the essay is 'about.'" Hoagland, ablaze in a trail of Pickwickian serendipity, is the sympathetic purveyor...
...information, a stickler for the facts. He has written a book about oranges, a most studious and exacting survey that would do justice to Montaigne in its recognition of fundamental cravings. Typically, McPhee works from the sidelines, bending his style to any angle or knot that might suit his subject: in one piece, the raging differences between conservationists and the Federal government are tightly defined when McPhee boards a rubber raft headed down the Colorado along with Friends of the Earth founder Dave Brower and the U.S. Commissioner of Reclamation: "'Come on now, Dave, be honest' (the Commissioner) said. 'From...
That men (and women, too, naturally) are products of their environment is a fact we should all know by now, but Burt Avedon's Ah, Men! goes into pedantic detail on the subject, using a few of his own thoughts but mostly those of a rather notable group, including Ashley Montagu, Helen Gurley Brown, Sterling Hayden, Gore Vidal, Michael Korda, George Plimpton, et al., in this dry, humorless tome. There are chapters on Growing Up, Work, Goals and Sex, and the quotes run from the noble (Plimpton: "I went to an English school in New York where we were taught...
Intensifying this strain is a sense that the military--and paramilitary--is ubiquitous. Many phones are tapped, letters censored, and on every corner in downtown Buenos Aires is positioned a guardsman with a machine gun and German metal World War II helmet. Even a foreigner is subject to this seemingly omniscient force. After a week in Buenos Aires, one noticed a man following her. When she pointed him out to friends, they frowned. "He's been following us for months. He probably thinks you're smuggling arms or socialist literature...