Word: text
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Goffstein's Natural History (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $6.95) gives children another kind of reassurance. The terse text and light watercolors examine a little ball called the planet earth, then move closer to watch the interdependence of animals and humans. It manages to touch lightly on all aspects of life, from war and poverty to square meals and love...
...scoops are to be found here; no lids get ripped off anything. Strout watches the men--scarcely a woman makes it into the text--who are running things and wonders about them and about what they will do next. The columns are breezy and interesting, 800 weekly words offering a glance at an issue or a man. It is a measure of Strout's talent that he can use that most pretentious of devices--first person plural--and still display a friendly and approachable, yet always impressive intellect...
Ruggero Raimondi's Don is a middle-aged, thin-lipped, white-faced sadist, a man more easily pictured flogging cats than seducing women. Raimondi fits in well with Losey's class-conscious interpretation of Da Ponte's text--he sees Don Giovanni as the consummate self-indulgent aristocrat. There's nothing wrong with coloring the opera this way, but Raimondi and Losey paint over and obliterate the other half of Don Giovanni's character, the youthful embodiment of unbounded energy who mesmerized the romantics. They do Mozart and Da Ponte an injustice by simplifying the libretto's psychological tangle...
...Forum editors' decision to distribute the text of the Wei trial spelled their downfall. After obtaining a tape recording of the 5½-hour proceedings, they first posted a transcript on democracy wall where it was read by thousands of people during the next three weeks. This limited access to the transcript was tolerated. But when it went on sale at 17? a copy the authorities evidently felt that they could not risk having it circulate throughout China. Wei, who had conducted his own defense at his trial, charged that China had scarcely changed since the ouster...
...Habit of Being by Flannery O'Connor (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1979). Letters of one of America's finest writers, who died in 1964, at age 39; the text is firm about Roman Catholicism, refreshingly short on self-pity about the disease that crippled her-and characteristically precise of mind and heart...