Ingenious as it is about art, ambition, hubris and the power of the imagination, this vigorous, sprightly book is ultimately constricted by the narrow idea from which it evolved.
The vigorous detailed book chronicles the final years of the sex symbol's life, when the actress was struggling with both substance abuse as well as the cancer which invaded her body.
The envelope of hardship cannot hold the arrow of life: Petterson's youthful novel is an openhearted bildungsroman, narrated in a first-person present tense, and we see Audun making his way, vigorous with books and politics and music, and full of determination to write.
If Mr Penn had properly charted the whole course of Henry VII's struggle to assert himself, this vigorous and thoroughly enjoyable book would have been even better.
So writes Michel Faber in "The Crimson Petal and the White," a book so vigorous and preternaturally delightful that a stylish brio enlivens even its weather reports.
In this vigorous, subtle and penetrating book, Tombs defies the proprieties of our politically motivated national history curriculum to rethink and revise notions of national identity.
Mr. Chagnon and his allies have mounted a vigorous counterattack since the book's contents were described in a widely circulated e-mail written by anthropologists Leslie Sponsel and Terry Turner.
Indeed he was making plans to get it published as soon as he could; a terrifying prospect to his friends and family, given the book's vigorous lampooning of the Soviet Union.
To his new literary acquaintances in New York City he appeared the character of his own books—extravert, vigorous, "with his cigar and his Spanish eyes," as one writer described him.
A comatose mind within a terrifyingly vigorous body is the analogy for post-Tiananmen China that emerges from Ma Jian's book.
