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Mick Brown reviews In Search of the Blues by Marybeth Hamilton.
More on Frost's notebooks.
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Excerpt from Christopher Benfey's review of the Frost notebooks in The New Republic:
The biggest surprise in The Notebooks of Robert Frost, sixty years of private jottings in preparation for poems and prose, is the spectacular profusion of epigrams, aphorisms, and what Frost called "dark sayings." Frost once wrote, in relation to Emerson, that "I don't like obscurity and obfuscation, but I do like dark sayings I must leave the clearing of to time." He remarks in an early notebook entry that "It is best to be flattered ... when your simile passes for a folk saying from a locality." Certain phrases recur many times in these notebooks, as Frost worries them into final shape: "Great thoughts grave thoughts" or (later used as the title for a poem) "Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length." Another saying, repeated at least a dozen times in the course of the notebooks, consists of three stark words, "dark darker darkest"--a sort of ominous refrain for the whole.
Jonathan Kirsch (no relation to Adam) reviews Richard A. Posner's The Little Book of Plagiarism.
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Jonathan (no relation to Kirsch) Yardley pans Vikram Chandra's massive Sacred Games, most hyped HarperCollins title of the season.
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Michael S. Hopkins reviews Made to Stick, an explanation by the Heath brothers of why some ideas stick and others don't.
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