Word: 80s
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...relentless pressure from Japan and other Asian industrial countries, inevitably washed up? Can the U.S. slash its record trade deficit without further depreciating its currency and building higher barriers to imports? New books by two veteran American journalists contain widely differing reflections on these pressing economic issues of the '80s. According to David Halberstam's The Reckoning (Morrow; $19.95), the U.S. has every reason for pessimism about its industrial future. But Robert Christopher's Second to None: American Companies in Japan (Crown; $16.95) presents an argument for pragmatic optimism: many U.S. companies are competing on their opponents' home ground more...
...headed back to Back to the Future? Yes, but with a sweeter, slower spin on the time machine. For while Robert Zemeckis' box-office champ of 1985 was a hip '80s teenager's look at his funny parents back in the '50s, Peggy Sue (whose script was written long before Future's release) is a panorama of the same terrain as seen by an adult full of remembrance and regret. The teen traveler played by Michael J. Fox was hurled back to a time he knew only from the decade's recycled pop culture. Peggy Sue's trip is spookier...
...meadow as he howls out his Ginsbergian verse ("Sucking pods of bitterness/ In the madhouse of Doctor Dread/ Razor shreds of rat puke fall on my bare arms"). She is even touched by Charlie's perplexed devotion, his doomed itch for pop stardom, his '50s suaveness that plays like '80s nerdity. Youth may be wasted on the young, but Peggy Sue savors it the second time around...
Hurtling down two streams of time, the '50s and the '80s, the book displays all the author's patented tics and tropes. The Beautiful Losers: a black, a homosexual, and -- among others persecuted in adolescence and now called home to disinter a buried memory -- a stutterer and an abused girl. The Validated Nightmare: "At the last instant, as the ax slowed to its apogee and balanced there, Richie understood that this wasn't a dream at all . . ." The Disgusting Colloquialism: "She drew in a great, hitching breath and hocked a remarkably large looey onto the top of his head...
...makes us want to go out on that field and destroy," says Halfback Melvin Bratton. As it happens, the Hurricanes' cleanest liver is their finest player and main destroyer. In Vinny Testaverde, they have produced a third quarterback for the ages in just the '80s, their sixth decade in the business but the first to speak of. The Hurricanes had a tradition in the '40s, but not of winning. They canceled a game with UCLA rather than play against Jackie Robinson...