Word: authored
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Underbook, the author displays commendable candor in disclosing what parts of his story are invented. He notes that a love affair between Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky and Anna Ella Carroll, a pro-Union pamphleteer, did not really happen. The trouble is, it hardly happens in the narrative either. When Breckinridge and Carroll get together, the passion they expend takes the form of abstract debate: "Two nights before, in her rooms at the Ebbitt House, they had stayed up through the dawn arguing the details of the ( President's war power." So much for titillation...
...phenomenon is accelerating so rapidly, says Andrew Kostecka, a Commerce Department analyst, that "franchising will be the leading method of doing business in the 21st century." John Naisbitt, author of the best-selling Megatrends, has estimated that franchising, which now accounts for just over a third of retail sales, will generate $1 trillion annually, or half of all sales, within 20 years...
...mystery here is why Author Tom Clancy abandoned the Popular Mechanics formula that served him so well in The Hunt for Red October (1984) and Red Storm Rising (1986): describe enough hardware and any plot can seem plausible. Clancy occasionally hits his old stride ("Pellets fired from a shotgun disperse radially at a rate of one inch per yard of linear travel"), but this time out he concentrates on his human characters, a subject apparently beyond the range of his research. Patriot Games is a minefield of unintended comedy. When, for instance, the Princess announces that she is two months...
Indeed, much of what the author finds in Central Australia is Greek to him. Descendants of the Lizard Man, the Bandicoot Man and the Perenty Man relinquish their secrets grudgingly. Strangers are usually given incomplete or false "dreamings." To sort them out, Chatwin attaches himself to an Australian-born son of Soviet immigrants who maps songlines in an attempt to preserve them from obliteration by mining companies and railroads. Arkady Volchok earned honors in history and philosophy from Adelaide University. He plays Bach on the harpsichord, speaks several aboriginal languages and holds the provocative opinion that his Slavic forebears make...
Chatwin contributes his own controversial assessments. The network of harmonious songlines convinces him that Homo sapiens is not hopelessly belligerent. He reconstructs a conversation he had with Konrad Lorenz, ethnologist and author of the influential On Aggression; he ransacks his notebooks and ponders anthropological and philosophical teachings. His hesitant conclusion is that humans are fundamentally restless and, like the aboriginal, the species needs to wander...