Word: algerism
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Examples of a close association between sports and city abound--Broadway Joe Namath uses his big-city playboy image to this day; Mickey Mantle, the Oklahoma kid who made it big on America's biggest stage came straight out of a Horatio Alger novel; Hideki Irabu's introduction to New York was Derek Jeter giving him a tour of the Chinatown club scene; and let us not forget the New York Knicks, the lovable bullies of the NBA--the civic myth of New York lives a charmed life within its sports scene...
Connerly's life, a Horatio Alger tale of an orphan's adversity, pluck and triumph, has an almost mythical value to his supporters. He was born in Louisiana, where his parents divorced when he was two (he hasn't seen his father since) and his mother died when he was four, leaving him in the care of her sister and brother-in-law Bertha and James Louis. At six, he moved with them to Bremerton, Wash.--a journey made difficult by segregation laws that shut them out of hotels, rest rooms and diners--and later to Sacramento, where Connerly...
...into the history of the 20th century, he found a huge historical correlative, a macrocosm, to match--and to explain--his own biography and, he thought, to enlarge it with the prestige of destiny. Chambers' high school classmates voted him "Class Prophet." Many years later, in the '50s, after Alger Hiss had been convicted of perjury and the cold war had hardened into a nuclear stalemate, Chambers wrote his summum, which he called Witness, meaning history's witness, a prophet looking backward...
...great litmus question of postwar politics--which of them was telling the truth?--Tanenhaus is clear. Walking again through all the familiar elements of the case (the Woodstock typewriter, the Bokhara rug, the prothonotary warbler, the famous Pumpkin Papers), Tanenhaus shows, if anyone still doubts it, that Alger Hiss was lying...
...stroke of bad timing, this authoritative reference book rides the espionage headlines exceedingly well. The Soviets' CIA mole Aldrich Ames is here, as is hot-off-the-press documentation gleaned from the long-secret U.S. "Venona" decrypts of Russian intelligence, which pretty much confirm the guilt of the late Alger Hiss. More than 2,000 entries deal with the history of spying, the complexities of cryptography and trade jargon (dry clean: to determine whether one is under surveillance; pianist: a clandestine radio operator; swallow: Russian term for a female agent assigned to seduce a target; raven: the male counterpart...