The film's strongest section is in its initial reel, which gravely recounts how the cunning and magical Ravenna (Charlize Theron) came to power through seduction and murder.
The book's strongest sections are the profiles of the "kids" from places as diverse as Bend, Oregon, Atlanta, Georgia, and Putnam's hometown, Port Clinton, Ohio – once an idyllic bootstrapping town ("We were poor, but we didn't know it," is how Putnam's old classmates put it), now a community ravaged by inequity.
The book's strongest sections are culled from extensive interviews with Joan Ganz Cooney, who oversaw production for more than twenty years, but the narrative loses steam once the show hits the air.
Notwithstanding its age, the strongest section of the book is the one dealing with marijuana.
Probably the strongest section of the book is that devoted to puddings.
The strongest section of the film is the one that deals with the attacks.
This is the strongest section in the book, less for the reporting than for the insight that Cassidy brings to it.
Lebed's tale is the strongest section of the book, and not just because it bolsters Lewis's thesis about the subversion of the old regime.
Ruthven's brilliant discussion of Qutb's prison tract, Signposts on the Road (sometimes translated as Milestones), is the strongest section in the book.
He is at his most successful when he allows his imagination to break free from the confines of his historical sources; this, curiously, means that the strongest section of the entire novel is his portrayal of the royal court during the crisis and, in particular, the relationship between the boy-king and his mother.
