Word: authority
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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What Amadeus sees is, of course, precisely what Author Wiechert saw in his own closing years. Defeat or victory in battle means "nothing or next to nothing," because today both victors and defeated share equally "the appalling fear of the terrible loneliness of the human race." Man's tie with tradition has been cut through, nor can mere political poster slogans bring back what has been lost. Woman used to be superior to man in maintaining the "well-arranged paths." But now, even she has forgotten "the old order of nature" and enters maturity "marching instead of dancing, carrying...
Irresponsibility. For a while, Carl and Joan cling to each other in a sort of unprincipled camaraderie: up to a point, Carl shares her lazy indifference to consequences, her pretty-eyed irresponsibility toward everyone, including oneself. But in the end, he makes his break. Along the way, Author McLaughlin (A Short Wait Between Trains, The Side of the Angels) again and again pierces his story with small but sharply accurate insights-how a man feels when he pointlessly watches a girl on the street, the horribly impersonal service in a funeral parlor almost too antiseptic to admit the image, "dust...
...life and death of Leon Trotsky, a kind of Marxist Macbeth, have been made into a novel by U.S. Author Bernard (The Late Risers, In Deep) Wolfe, who was one of Trotsky's aides in the years before the inevitable assassin caught up with him in his Mexico hideaway...
Strange Household. When Author Wolfe, newly out of Yale, first encountered him in January 1937, Trotsky had just joined Mexico's impressive gallery of grotesques, and later did, in fact, figure in Mexico City's waxworks museum (wearing tweed knickerbockers), along with Emperor Maximilian and Mahatma Gandhi. Author Wolfe's version of Trotsky is itself a kind of waxworks figure (the writing sounds as if Ernest Hemingway were trying to parody Gromyko), but the book has the great merit of pointing to Trotsky's moral dilemma: Would he have used power less ruthlessly than Stalin...
...Author Wolfe claims that his story, which turns on two attempts on Trotsky's life, follows the facts. The account of the assassination relies on General Sanchez Salazar, Mexican chief of secret police, whose Murder in Mexico established beyond much doubt that the man who murdered Trotsky was in fact a Stalinist agent. Wolfe's picture is drawn against the background of what must have been one of the strangest households in the world-young bodyguards filling sandbags and filing correspondence for revolution's exiled royalty. About the house in Coyoacán, six miles south...