Word: badness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...heart and soul of our national will? A rebirth of the American spirit? A great many citizens had already come to think of the President as a bit of an oddball, attuned more to metaphysics than to politics. After that impassioned, fretful analysis of the country's bad mood in the summer of 1979, his reputation never really recovered...
...Patriotism," said Dr. Johnson just as the American Revolution was beginning, "is the last refuge of a scoundrel." At about the same time, Dr. Pangloss was giving optimism a bad name too. "In this best of all possible worlds," said the Voltaire character, "all is for the best." But those impulses, patriotism and optimism, are prominent and connected in the American psyche. The idea of manifest destiny carried both to a bellicose extreme; Franklin Roosevelt, when he insisted that the nation had nothing to fear but fear itself, expressed the linkage beautifully. Patriotic trappings took on particular importance...
...from the Belgian coast. Gale-force winds and 15-ft. swells had broken it in two, raising fears that 30 steel containers filled with uranium hexafluoride, raw material from which nuclear fuel is made, might be swept out of the ship's holds into the sea. Then the bad weather broke, salvage operations resumed, and by midweek the first of the containers, originally destined for the Soviet Union, was winched to the surface...
...Megan, central, unifying character that she is. A brief fling with a transplanted preppie while she's a California high school student drives her East, to the very place where he's in med school--you guessed it. She learns--the hard way, of course--the differences between bad girls and good girls, and goes about relieving herself of what she thinks of an her "technical virgin" status with every imaginable unacceptable type she runs across, including a Jewish "section man" and a Black jazz musician. She makes friends with a Jewish girls who winds up marrying an Irish playwright...
...shame these characters aren't more alive, or at least in a more convincing setting--one evocative of the Harvard-Radcliffe scene of 40 years ago. It's also a shame Superior Women didn't appear three months ago. It wouldn't be such a bad beach book...