I leaned back in the driver's seat and listened to my younger self quietly, forcefully reading her sad, painful story.
Hitchens is often grouped with a generation of dazzlingly clever British writers who happen to be his friends — Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, James Fenton — but what sets him apart in important ways, and what struck me forcefully reading this collection, is that he is an American.
I was reminded of this forcefully while reading Hotel Florida, Amanda Vaill's biographical study of three couples during the Spanish Civil War, a book I began (full disclosure) because Amanda is a close friend but that grew increasingly frightening and relevant with every page.
Ruff read forcefully over the arena's P.A., pausing after the last lines: "Ghost dance your way to oblivion / Break bones like treaties / Gentrify your humanity / Until you can't afford to be human".
After John F. Kennedy won the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, America's most widely read Protestant minister, forcefully demonstrated the power of negative thinking when he addressed a group of leading Protestant ministers at a conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom by declaring: "The election of a Catholic President would change America".
Not many books these days remind you so directly and forcefully that reading is about creating new ways of seeing the world and new imaginative worlds to inhabit -- that it's a type of play, and that like all play it can transform grown-ups' lives as much as children's.
That afternoon, Garfield listened as a friend read aloud Thomas Jefferson's first, probably more forcefully than had Jefferson, who was, famously, a mumbler.
Indeed, for a full insider's account, one might as well head straight to the individual who most forcefully felt the impact of the fatal legacy and read Major's own excellent autobiography.
After being helped to the front of the stage he read five of his poems, speaking slowly and forcefully.
There was the distrust of so-called "culture", which George Steiner had voiced so forcefully in Language and Silence - how could the Nazis read Goethe, listen to Schubert and gas Jews?
