Word: affair
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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REGURGITATIVELY, Barth lifts his characters, these war correspondents of the literary battlefield, from each of his past books. The one new creation, Lady Amherst, is also the best. Her sequence of letters to the author describes the progress of her affair with Ambrose Mensch, a dilettante writer late of Lose in the Funhouse. Barth makes a feeble effort to set her up as an allegorical representation of "Belles Lettres," on which her--or Ambrose--hopes to father forth a new novel, but she balks, her past liaisons with famous men of letters notwithstanding...
...affair of Lady Amherst and Mensch holds the reader's chief interest and sympathy because it's the most coherent and human part of Letters; the other characters dance a contorted jig about it, A. B. Cook III and his descendant A. B. Cook VI send their unborn children endless genealogical accounts of the family's intrigues, centering around the War of 1812. Jerome Bonaparte Bray, part dictator, part human fly, part servant of a computer, plots a Second American Revolution. Todd Andrews--still alive, despite The Floating Opera's denouement--writes to his dead father contemplating a second suicide...
...replay of the Soviet-troops-in-Cuba affair? Not exactly, but the controversy surrounding new military preparations on the tiny Soviet-held island of Shikotan off the coast of Japan did bear some striking similarities. In Tokyo last week Japan's top defense official, Ganri Yamashita, reported to the Cabinet that over the past year the Soviet Union has deployed up to 12,000 combat troops on Shikotan and two other isles in the southern Kurils, less than twelve miles off Japan's northeastern shore. The division-level force, he said, was equipped with tanks, SAM antiaircraft missiles...
Some may visualize crisis management as a frenzied affair in which key policymakers converge on the White House in limousines, when harassed officials are bombarded by nervous aides rushing in with the latest flash cables. I have found this not to be accurate; periods of crisis, to be sure, involve great tension they are also characterized by a strange tranquillity All the petty day-to-day details are ignored, postponed or handled by subordinates. Personality clashes are reduced; too much is usually at stake for normal jealousies to operate. In a crisis only the strongest strive for responsibility; the rest...
...sign of that determination is China's present love affair with science. It is the leading subject in schools; under Chairman Hua Guofeng's "six ones program" schoolchildren read at least one science book, tell one science story, do one experiment, explain one natural phenomenon and prophesy one scientific advance. Scientific goals and triumphs are heralded on wall posters, and popular science magazines are flourishing, extolling every contemporary marvel...