Word: accountants
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...written anything substantial himself, and the passions aroused by his dizzying ascent and precipitous collapse have stirred memoirists and biographers ever since. Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde will not be the last word on this subject, but it is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive, measured and fascinating account. Ellmann, who died seven months ago of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), was the author of the landmark literary biography James Joyce (1959). In his numerous books and essays he displayed an acute, doctrine-free sensitivity to the many ways that writers such as Yeats, Beckett, Eliot and Auden...
Ellmann's account of this lamentable affair is candid and sympathetic. "Bosie" Douglas, 16 years Wilde's junior, had a taste for casual, commercial sex and induced Wilde to follow this lead. The older man was the innocent: "What seems to characterize all Wilde's affairs is that he got to know the boys as individuals, treated them handsomely, allowed them to refuse his attentions without becoming rancorous, and did not corrupt them. They were already prostitutes." That Wilde was careless, selfish and inconsiderate toward his faithful wife and his children is beyond dispute. But he did not deserve being...
...MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB by Richard Rhodes. The best account to date about the ideas, politics and people responsible for the nuclear age -- to say nothing of the Age of Anxiety...
...crash, they briefly considered a proposal to scale down Social Security cost-of- living increases. Congressman Claude Pepper, 87, held a press conference to announce that he would force a separate House vote on the issue. The Gray Lobby went to work. The result? Although programs for the elderly account for one-third of the budget, negotiators dropped the proposal in a fright. "These are people who have plenty of time on their hands, who are well organized, who vote regularly, and they are a massive political force," lamented Budget Director James Miller...
...foreign policy too, Gorbachev's approach is a mixture of much touted "new thinking" and dismayingly old reflexes. Despite his flexibility in the realm of superpower relations, he maintains some strange attitudes about the U.S. By his own account, he began reading American history as a law student, and he has kept himself remarkably well informed. In recent interviews he has referred offhandedly to matters, such as Ronald Reagan's "economic bill of rights," that are not widely known even to U.S. citizens...