She writes that she is "the planet's most affectionate life-form (something like a cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle)." The three words in the book's title correspond to the three countries she sets out to visit, and "eat," unsurprisingly, is what she wants to do in Italy.
Wonderfully, "Splendor," the movie and the comic-book, both take off into the stratosphere when they evoke the teeming, dirty and affectionate rundown life of Elzie Segar's "Popeye" comic strips, with their brisk American existentialism.
Walter Isaacson's thorough, comprehensive, affectionate new biography, "Einstein: His Life and Universe" (Simon & Schuster; $32), relates how, in 1931, during the fifty-one-year-old scientist's second visit to America, he and his second wife, Elsa, attended, in California, a séance at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Upton Sinclair.
They are sometimes sardonic, sometimes affectionate snapshots of life in the Austrian capital, on to which Cerha has layered memories of the Austrian folk music he played in pre-war Vienna.
"I was tired of sleep-deprived, stressed-out, too-busy people who shirked downtime in the service of making money," she writes in RADIO SHANGRI-LA: What I Learned in the Happiest Kingdom on Earth (Crown, $25), her affectionate portrait of life in a slower-paced, high-altitude society.
There are affecting and affectionate descriptions of life in Pricklebush, the shanty town where all the aboriginals live, the procession across Australia of the travelling evangelical, Mozzie Fishman, and the zany behaviour of the family's matriarch, Angel Day.The influence of Carlos Fuentes, a Mexican novelist and essayist and one of Ms Wright's favourite writers, is never far away.
He knows that preaching won't get him anywhere, so he has perfected the art of being funny and affectionate about English life through which he has morphed into being a national somebody, a role he acknowledges, while sending it up.
From 1760 to 1762, Jefferson attended William and Mary College and there befriended Professor William Small, "a man profound in most of the useful branches of science" ([Au]: 4), lawyer George Wythe, "beloved Mentor in youth, and my most affectionate friend through life" ([Au]: 4 5), and Lieutenant Governor Francis Fauquier.
This affectionate comedy of village life was Hardy's first real success.
The jazz pianist turns 90 on Monday and Arena was an affectionate distillation of his life, times and music.
