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November 28, 2006

Comments

cheryl

I'm deeply sadden by the loss of this great writer and woman. I was blessed to meet her during one of her book signings in Detroit several years ago. I also listened to her read exerpts from her book Sweet Summer in Lansing, MI. What an awesome experience for me!!! Finally, I so appreciated her candure as she discussed her challenge with anxiety/panie attacks. I have all of her books, 2 of them signed, for which I will cherish.

Ms. Moore-Campbell was my comtemporary and I always anxiously awaited her writings.

My prayers are with the entire family. Heaven has received a beautiful angel. God Bless you husband, mother, and children. Thank you for sharing Bebe with us.

Audrey DiNardo

I am deeply saddened by the loss of Bebe Moore Campbell. I read many of her novels, and look forward to reading 72 Hour hold. It is fitting that she is remembered as a "phenominal woman" by her husband and family. I certainly understand her contribution to society. I think of the legends ball that Oprah gave and I don't recall her being there, but she was definity a woman name that we should speak. My condolences to her family and dear friends.

julie mcgee

I've just arrived back in town and my son's girlfriend looked in my bookcase and saw all my bebe moore campbell books..She then told me of her transition..I am still floored..I didn't want to believe it until i actually went on line...72 hour hold was so real for me and my family...i will always cherish the experience of knowing her through her books...What an awesome woman..."Well Done" BEBE "Well Done"..
Thanks for sharing her with the world..jules

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."