Word: american
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...F.D.R. was, of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was congratulating him for persuading a reluctant Congress to pass a bill they both deemed essential for Allied victory in World War II. Short as it was, the President's letter summarized his admiration for the co-architect of American strategy: without Marshall in Washington, he said, he could not sleep at night. In fact, that justifiable anxiety cost Marshall the job he so greatly coveted: Supreme Commander in Europe, which went instead to his protege Dwight Eisenhower...
...number of American families living below the poverty line, currently an annual income of $12,091 for a family of four, fell last year to 13.1% of the population, from 13.4% in 1987. But that percentage is still higher than it was a decade ago, when it stood at 11.4%. In addition, earnings for full-time male workers fell 1.3% in 1988, the first decline since 1982, while wages for female workers were unchanged...
...outline could as well describe a nature documentary or even a children's picture -- anyway, something bland, earnest or otherwise simpleminded. This is not to imply that The Bear, which is an adaptation by French filmmakers of a 1916 novel by the American outdoorsman James Oliver Curwood, lacks educational value. Or that children will not be charmed by the misadventures of its bouncy, cuddly hero. But the highest pleasures of this wondrous movie lie not in its apparently artless narrative but in the artful ways it transcends...
...parsed by press critics; we get into contretemps with the powerful; we serve as filler for the growing number of gossip columns. All this is, in principle, legitimate. Those who groan reflexively when needled or critiqued simply confirm the aphorism about journalistic skins being thinner than the average American adult's. What stokes my personal I.L. is the frequency of error in these items. The venerable practice of checking ostensible facts with the story's subject seems to be declining...
After years of activists' complaints about abuses in Soviet psychiatric facilities, 26 American psychiatrists, lawyers and interpreters last March toured such institutions in the U.S.S.R. and interviewed more than two dozen patients whose hospitalization had been questioned. The watchdog group concluded that while improvements had been made, disturbing evidence remained of unjustified confinements and fundamental shortcomings in psychiatric practice. Most troubling were the continued use of drugs that appeared to have more punitive than therapeutic value and the domination of the Soviet psychiatric establishment by some of the very officials who ruled it when abuse was rampant...