December 2005
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Laura is a stylish noir whodunit that holds up well even after the passage of sixty years. It is cleverly written and handsomely cinematographed but it also comes with some murky psychological baggage that may or may not make sense. At the heart of the enigma is Waldo Lydecker (played by Clifton Webb). He's so
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Women and Thomas Harrow was John P. Marquand's last novel. It was published in 1958; Marquand (born in 1893) died in 1960. It's another good but not great book. Despite the witty surface, it's very sad. Thomas Harrow (clearly a surrogate for Marquand himself) is a successful but not brilliant playwright; in the course of
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When I read Neal Ascherson's Black Sea, I had to admit that I knew nothing at all about a huge and contested part of the world. I followed up on Ascherson's bibliography and read a series of ethnographic studies of ancient Black Sea peoples — Scythians, Sarmatians, etc. — and from there moved eastward to
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Sloan Wilson's 1955 best-seller is saturated with alcohol. Nary a character can carry on a conversation without first mixing a highball, a scotch, a manhattan, or a batch of martinis. "Let's have a drink" is the lubricant without which the novel couldn't proceed. In The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the characters not only
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When I was a just a young sprout, every summer I would grow, from seed, in my father's crowded backyard garden, a small plot of snapdragons. Inasmuch as I had, or seemed to have in those years, endless time, I became a connoisseur of the plant's growth habit: its elongated long smooth leaves with their
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"At this important crisis (i. e. the attack on Rome's Balkan outposts by Huns in 375 A. D.), the military government of Thrace was exercised by Lupicinus and Maximus, in whose venal minds the slightest hope of private emolument outweighed every consideration of public advantage; and whose guilt was only alleviated by their incapacity of
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Our president's knowledge of geography is famously shaky. He seems to be under the impression that the Kingdom of Jordan is a gulf coast country, that Africa is a nation, and that Europe is one of America's key allies. On being shown a map of South America, he said, to the president of that continent's
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Still another novel by John Phillips Marquand, this time Point of No Return, a great big book (550 pages) that's too long by half. A blockbuster, I think, in its day — 1947 — but disappointing to re-read after fifty or so years. Just as in Marquand's earlier novels, the central figure, Charles Gray, feels
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Here are two consecutive sentences written by Neill Woelk, a writer for the Boulder Daily Camera. They appeared in today's paper. "Simply, if Bohn decides to leave for another job, CU should be fairly compensated. Thing is, Bohn doesn't have a contract yet." My questions: is "thing is" an acceptable substitute for "moreover," or "the