Word: americans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Present at the creation." That was how Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's Secretary of State, described the crucial role of American officials in the birth of postwar Europe. Conceiving the Marshall Plan and midwifing NATO, U.S. officials went on to deploy America's power at its zenith to shape the framework of European security for two generations...
...American readers know Rezzori mainly for two richly convoluted memory novels of Europe before and after World War II, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (1981) and The Death of My Brother Abel (1985). The Snows of Yesteryear looks back before their time frame, to the childhood and, implicitly, the formation of a writer. It leads into a world now irretrievably lost, its values blown away by World War I and its fortunes wrecked by the inflationary '20s -- "For the class to which my parents belonged . . . a fall into chaos, into impotence and deprivation...
...that McGuane is complaining. A fit 50, he has weathered the storms of literary celebrity, Hollywood, alcoholism, two failed marriages and at least one critical scalping, only to retain his stature as one of the most original American writers on either side of the Mississippi. This fall his seventh novel, Keep the Change, was published, ending a four-year hiatus from long fiction. The New York Times proclaimed it the "best book he has written to date." Almost as sweet is the news that Keep the Change is already the best- selling book of his career. No wonder that McGuane...
...same time, McGuane rejects the charge that he has turned his back on reality by retreating to "a kind of Early American theme park." To McGuane, both urban blight and rural isolation are symptoms of a deeper problem. "I do think that there's a kind of national illness, and I think that every American is touched by it," he says. "It's a by-product of this 20-year wave of narcissism and self-help movements and stuff where people have lost the ability to refer to things larger than themselves, and their reward is solitude. It penetrates Montana...
Christian Okoye had never seen an American football game before 1982. When he did see one, he didn't much like it. The elongated shape of the ball seemed peculiar. He found the repeated stops and starts boring and confusing. Worse, he felt the frequent substitutions from the sidelines robbed the game of the natural flow that is the glory of soccer, his consuming passion since grade school...