Word: authority
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...made it sedition to speak ill of the President and the Government contained no provision against flag desecration. Still, Federalist judges sitting at the time would have been happy to imprison any Jeffersonian Republican who abused the flag. Among the Americans the Federalists did put behind bars was the author of a placard that urged NO STAMP ACT, NO SEDITION AND NO ALIEN ACTS. And newspapers sternly denounced as "seditious" a group that burned not the flag, but the Alien and Sedition Acts...
Unlike such drugs as barbiturates and opiates, which affect the nervous system, alcohol can attack virtually any of the body's cells. It can cause stunted growth, distorted faces, poor eyesight, learning disabilities and hyperactivity. In the recently published book The Broken Cord (Harper & Row; $18.95), author Michael Dorris tells the heartbreaking story of his adopted son Adam, whose Sioux parents died of alcohol abuse. Adam was institutionalized and diagnosed as retarded before he turned three. At five, he still wore diapers, could not count consecutively or even identify colors. "Adam's birthdays are reminders for me," writes Dorris...
Confession is a religious ritual and a literary device, a point that John Gregory Dunne has illustrated a number of times during his career as a U.S. journalist and novelist. For example, Vegas (1974) was an unflattering, candid account of a bad time in the author's life, an on-the-road book that played personal problems against the city that passes for Sodom, U.S.A...
Much of the author's experience is the vicarious quest for material and a hard-boiled persona. He becomes knowledgeable about firearms by reading about them; he familiarizes himself with the latest in sex toys by researching them at a Frankfurt porno shop. But his education in cardiology is firsthand. "In the seventh year of the Reagan kakistocracy, the medical dyes shooting through my arterial freeways were forced to make a detour around a major obstruction," he writes with calculated self-mockery...
...full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." Although she focused on a ruptured relationship between author Joe McGinniss (Fatal Vision) and his subject, murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, many readers assumed that Malcolm was writing confessionally, if unknowingly, about herself...