Word: alarm
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...semimemoir, A Boy's Own Story, Edmund White came as close as anyone has to producing the Great American Gay Novel. Its depiction of sexual awakening was vividly specific, yet its emotional terrain -- initial delight leading to guilt and alarm at the strange new force in one's life -- might have evoked adolescence for almost any reader. The Beautiful Room Is Empty, a sequel that takes White into young manhood, is at once clumsier and much more ambitious. At times as pretentious as the title, derived from Kafka, it trots out a succession of irritatingly self-indulgent characters...
...waiting room, where the exit signs read NO EXIT, the dead still carry scars of their demise. A magician's assistant, who has been fatally sawed in half, occupies two seats on a couch. The social worker who runs the place is clearly overworked; she has an alarm on her wristwatch that plays Chopin's Funeral March in ricky-tick time...
...flag of the confederacy--once a badge of honor--has become a badge of hate. In North Carolina, school officials are facing a new form of civil disobedience. Junior high and high school students are pinning the flag to their apparel, much to the alarm of school administrators who fear the flag will increase racial tensions. Students who refuse to remove the flag are being kicked out of Carolina classrooms...
Bertha: That's the fire alarm for the fire. The battery's getting weak...
...contras are bereft of American aid, and may be threatened with extinction as a fighting force, eliminating what may be the only U.S. leverage for keeping the Sandinistas honest. Yet the Administration's cries of alarm have been met with widespread skepticism. Once again the President fudged his reasons for dispatching troops, offering the claim that the border battle represented a Sandinista "invasion" of Honduras. Two years ago he made the same assertion when he sent U.S. helicopters to ferry Honduran troops to the border. That crisis too had flared while he was pressing Congress to reconsider support...