The studiously constructed character arc also serves the book's broader goal.
In order to serve the book, you have to change the book".
I loved the workaday tenderness of the details and the illustrations, although old-fashioned, are enlivened with gold and serve the book well.
It serves the book well, for much of Negroland has the experimental and experiential quality of jazz – albeit the formal variety found in the concert hall rather than the freestyle, down and dirty jamming of the backstreet club.
Or it might be that there is a still-larger character to serve: the book's clever structure itself with its drolly-titled sections, its series of chapter-ending kickers and reveals, and its general, all-consuming serio-comic inertia.
But to advocate this sensible middle ground — to say that success comes from a combination of ambition, humility, and self-discipline — wouldn't serve the book's performative purpose, which is to present parents and children as players in a "Wuthering Heights -like drama of Romantic destruction and transcendence.
The high drama sometimes wore me out I think my life is intense, but these people are professionals and yet that serves the book.
So I thought it might serve the book best if a reader had to think about where they were positioned each time something happened, to think, 'Where am I relative to this interaction?
READERS, it seems to me, are generally well served by the Book Review screening process.
Douglas served as the book review editor of The Miami Herald from 1942 to 1949, and as editor for the University of Miami Press from 1960 to 1963.
