Word: authored
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Fidel Castro. U.S. readers are sufficiently detached from the Cuban strongman to see this as comedy, perhaps. But the plot winds on to include the assassination of President Kennedy, and the novel's cheerful inventions fall flat. The old horror of November 1963 floods across the pages, and the author's paper heroics for the first time seem chattery and idle...
...COUNTERLIFE by Philip Roth. In a metaphysical thriller, Nathan Zuckerman, the author's durable doppelganger, once again becomes an instrument for examining the relationship between fact and fiction...
Jimmy Breslin is happiest when he is making himself and others angry. He has successfully done so as a New York City newspaper columnist, a sporadic television personality, and the author of six novels. He got his big break in the early '60s at the New York Herald Tribune, where his colleagues included the Richmond dandy Tom Wolfe. The contrast between the two journalists was stark. Wolfe, elegant and soft-spoken, paralyzed his victims with a distinctive satire for which there is still no antidote. Breslin looked like a dented truck, talked loud and dirty, and went after his targets...
...contradictions in his personality are enough to raise a question: Who exactly is Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev? It is not an easy question to answer: unhappily, glasnost does not yet extend to the life of its author. One reason, no doubt, is his wariness about encouraging a "cult of personality" -- the euphemism for glorification of an all-powerful leader, which reached sickening heights under Joseph Stalin in Gorbachev's student days and is thus associated in Soviet minds with Stalin's terror. Gorbachev has reacted to incipient hagiography in the Soviet press by being tight-lipped about his private life. Subordinates...
...fear. There was reason to be wary of him: Neznansky asserts that when Gorbachev discovered that some fellow students had parents who were in political disgrace, he called for their expulsion from the Komsomol and perhaps from the university as well. Michel Tatu, a prominent French Kremlinologist and author of a forthcoming biography of Gorbachev, is convinced that he joined in the vicious anti-Semitic rhetoric of Stalin's last purge, launched just before the dictator's death in early 1953. Mlynar does not deny that, but he insists that Gorbachev steered clear of any individual persecutions...