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New York Times
April 23rd, 2006 |
When the Best Is Not Good Enough
Paula Marantz Cohen |
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As April draws to a close, parents of college-bound children can finally relax. The verdicts are in. No more lying awake worrying that the A.P. biology teacher can't write a decent reference letter, or carrying around a pocket calculator to recheck G.P.A., or clogging supermarket aisles to compare rankings in U.S. News & World Report.
Having been caught in the insanity with my first child (and wanting to avoid it with my second) I decided to stand back and ask: Why do so many intelligent, rational people turn into basket cases when their children start the application process? Parents have always wanted the best for their children, but in the last decade this desire has taken an unusually obsessive form.
For the next crop of parents, before they succumb, here is my own sociological analysis of what's going on.
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Per Contra
Summer 2006 |
The Stain
Paula Marantz Cohen |
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David entered the house through the garage. “What the hell did you do to the car?” he shouted at Linda, who was standing at the kitchen counter making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for Melissa.
“What do you mean?” Linda asked, as she spread the jelly on the sandwich.
“What do you think I mean! There’s a big red stain on the passenger seat!”
“Oh, that.” Linda shrugged.
“Oh that!” David’s voice had gotten louder. “It’s a big red stain! What did you do? Fucking kill someone?”
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Hudson Review
Summer 2002
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Israel and Daniel Deronda
Paula Marantz Cohen |
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It occasionally happens that a book written to explain an earlier age takes on a new and startling relevance in a later one. This is the case with George Eliot’s last and most ambitious novel, Daniel Deronda. Published in parts between 1873 and 1876, the novel not only anticipates the creation of the state of Israel some seventy-five years later, it also supplies a vocabulary with which to talk about Israel’s situation as it has evolved into the present. It is a book that needs to be read by anyone interested in the moral difficulties facing Israel today and, more broadly, the difficulties inherent in any national movement as it moves from an ideal to a reality.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer
January 19, 2006 |
Austen Characters are Much Like Us
Paula Marantz Cohen |
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Paula Marantz Cohen is distinguished professor of English at Drexel University
Lionel Trilling once wrote that Jane Austen possessed two sorts of admirers: those who read her for her keen insight into human nature and those who read her for a cozy image of old England. The recent film of Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley, clearly embraces the latter virtue. A great deal of time and money has been lavished on the details of English country life, down to the pigs in the Bennet yard and the hectic press of flesh at the local balls.
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Review by Paula Marantz Cohen
The American Scholar
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Design For Living: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne
By Margot Peters |
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In Henry James’s short story “The Real Thing,” a painter, intent upon creating an image of extreme refinement, hires two impecunious aristocrats to pose for him. After attempting unsuccessfully to capture the effect he wants, he finally dismisses his models, dresses his servants in their clothes, and finds that they present a far more convincing impression of nobility than “the real thing.”
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