Word: authority
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Under interrogation, quite a few members of John le Carre's vast and devoted reading public might confess a gnawing secret: the wish that the author would get on with his stories a bit more speedily than he has been doing for the past 15 or so years. Ever since Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), in this view, Le Carre has been unduly shifting emphasis from action to atmospherics; his espionage plots remained splendidly inventive, but they arrived splintered into ambiguities worthy of Henry James. Which was fine, maybe, for those who wanted their cold war shenanigans decked...
...Gorbachev, who came to Beijing in his guise of Triumphant Conciliator, the demonstrations, which hailed his other persona of Democratic Liberator, were something of an embarrassment. The contrast with the treatment accorded Deng, once recognized as a great economic reformer and the author of China's recent prosperity, could not have been starker: huge effigies were paraded around with placards saying DOWN WITH DENG XIAOPING...
Though senior writer Otto Friedrich has written ten other books, he is best known as the author of an acclaimed biography of a brilliant pianist, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations (Random House). When he is not buried in his own writing, Friedrich sometimes dons the mantle of literary agent. Impressed by the reporting that Denise Worrell, then TIME's show-business correspondent, had done on celebrities from Michael Jackson to George Lucas, he offered to spend his lunch hours showing Worrell's work to publishers. A flattered if skeptical Worrell said, "Great!" then forgot about...
...people like Kwonjune Seung '91, the author of the East Wind article, whom I have in mind when I think about minority self-segregation. In his piece, Seung betrays his innermost thoughts: "Perhaps Hsia has never gone out on a dinner date with a white lady friend and felt the temperature drop several degrees. Then he cannot understand how liberating it can be to able to date members of the same minority group...
...good eight years later? When Gould died at 50 in 1982, he left behind a mess of unanswered letters and a plethora of unanswered questions. Now, for the first time, the whole jumble has been largely straightened out in an admirably lucid and level-headed biography by Otto Friedrich, author of such previous books as Before the Deluge and City of Nets and a TIME senior writer. In Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations (Random House; $24.95), Friedrich counterpoints Gould's prolific writings with the reminiscences of more than 80 people who knew him, from Leonard Bernstein to his cousin...