Word: ax
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Like most close Congressional races in Massachusetts this year, the ax wielded by the State Legislature's Redistricting Committee could play a crucial role. Parts of Dorchester have been moved out of the district, replaced by seven suburbs to Boston's south. This introduces a new facet to 9th District politics: Republicans. This is where Miller will get most of his support. Miller, ironically enough, is the most liberal candidate in the race, and has been attacking both Hicks and Moakley as products of the old politics who are owned by traditional political bosses...
...turbulence, however, this deadens it, lending The Assassination of Trotsky the faintly instructional air of a classroom film strip. By contrast, the movie assassination is staged like a scene out of some Hammer horror epic. Trotsky roars and staggers about after Jacson has smashed his skull with an ice ax. Images of Rasputin, riddled by bullets and reeling from poison, are inevitable and surely inappropriate...
...rugged homestead country of Australia one evening in 1900, the wife of one of the area's white settlers answers a knock at her farmhouse door. Out of the darkness rushes the hired man, an aboriginal, flailing about with an ax. Moments later the farmer's wife, her two daughters and a schoolmistress-boarder lie hacked to death...
Keneally's narrative has the short, brutal rhythm of the ax, each stroke glinting with images of hallucinatory brilliance (in a flash of revulsion against his aboriginal brethren, Jimmie imagines "a vineyard of gallows from which hung all the inept, unfortunate race, emphatically asleep"). Occasionally, Keneally overheats his language, invoking the pull of blood and the core of blackness in a way that recalls D.H. Lawrence in a rant. But most of the time the novel's intensity arises naturally from the dualities that throb at its center -black and white, crime and punishment, civilization and savagery...
Billy Graham? Oral Roberts? Not quite. The speaker is Lester Maddox, former Governor and now Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, onetime wielder of ax handles to keep blacks away from his Pickrick restaurant in Atlanta, and one of the hottest speakers these days on the U.S. fundamentalist circuit...