Volume 48, Number 3 · February 22, 2001
Intensive Care
By Charles Simic
The Diagnosis
by Alan Lightman
Pantheon, 369 pp., $25.00
OTHER BOOKS BY ALAN LIGHTMAN DISCUSSED IN THIS REVIEW
Einstein's Dreams
by Alan Lightman
Warner Books, 179 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Good Benito
by Alan Lightman
Warner Books, 215 pp., $8.99 (paper)
Dance for Two
by Alan Lightman
Pantheon, 169 pp., $12.00 (paper)
It was easier, I think now and then, to be a novelist or a poet in the days before cable television. Today it only takes ten minutes of flipping channels to find that whatever pet theory one had about the world up to that moment is badly shaken. It's one thing to think about America in the abstract and another to actually see half a dozen preachers preaching, talk shows on everything from politics to dieting, ceaselessly repeated commercials, forty-year-old sitcoms with canned laughter, cooking shows, wars and revolutions in progress, music videos, soaps, the shopping channels selling wigs, discount jewelry, burglary alarms, and Samurai steak knives. 'We are coming to you live,' the reporters remind us from a forest fire or an of-fice building where a disgruntled em-ployee has shot his boss and six other co-workers.
Review, 4179 words
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