Word: authority
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Soon enough it was time for the performance, and Marge's parlor filled to overflowing. Everyone was there, it seemed, but Choteau's best-known citizen, A.B. Guthrie Jr., author of The Big Sky, among other celebrated works. He is 85, and the last time he came, explained his daughter, Helen Guthrie Miller, "he fell asleep in the kitchen. The next morning he woke up screaming, 'Who's making all that goddam racket!' " Helen Guthrie Miller possesses a tart tongue herself, it turns out. When a woman companion at the recital boasted that because of aerobics, she has the pulse...
...murky equations of the Middle East, power is usually bought with gunpowder. Johns Hopkins Professor Fouad Ajami, author of the recently published The Vanished Imam, a profile of Moussa Sadr, the charismatic Shi'ite cleric and political leader, calls the Shi'ites the "stepchildren of the Arab world." After a docile history centered on agriculture, they first took up arms in a serious way when Lebanon's civil war broke out, in 1975. But it was not until 1982, when the Israelis invaded Lebanon, that the stage was set for the explosion of Shi'ite power...
Some athletes apparently turn to drugs as a way of coping with the stress of the sporting life. "There is tremendous psychological pressure on athletes," says John Weistart, a law professor at Duke and co-author of The Law of Sports. "They are surrounded by people boosting their egos and telling them they're invulnerable to the ordinary pressures that we all face. An athlete has to deal with the disjunction between the outside world, which says he's exceptional, and what he feels inside, which is he's just as human as the rest...
...news that a theologian of sorts is the main character in John Updike's twelfth novel will not thrill all of the author's devoted readers, although it should not surprise them either. The Poorhouse Fair (1959), Updike's first % novel, was an allegory explicitly framed around contradictory notions of the nature of God. The author's reputation and fame grew with his extraordinarily graceful and graphic renderings of contemporary manners and mores. Couples (1968), the three Rabbit novels, the two collections of stories about the Jewish writer and malingerer Henry Bech, all present surfaces so intriguing that...
...second act, where the Broadway version bogged down in depiction of the family's fate, the narrative confidently shifts into analysis of the American character -- the need for belief and common purpose and even catastrophe to shake people out of self-absorption. As Lee Baum, the author's surrogate, Neil Daglish is touching, introspective and believably American. But the play's most convincing voice is Miller's, admonishing us: "There has never been a society that hasn't had a clock running on it." His American Clock records harrowing midnights and piteously false dawns...