Word: barney
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Institute officials hope that by limiting participation in meetings mainly to members of one House they will create a more informal, familiar atmosphere and get better discussions, Barney Frank '62, special assistant to the director of the Institute, said yesterday...
Retreat Home. Bourjaily describes the assassination's effect chiefly on two men. One actually knew Kennedy. Dave Doremus not only sailed against Jack as a boy, but he also shared a ward with him in a naval hospital. The other, Barney James, is Doremus' lifelong friend. The story begins when Bourjaily's characters hear of the assassination. Barney and his wife are about to sail on a cruise with Dave and Dave's new wife when the "news from the southwest" reaches them. An instinctual fear that "something is moving around out there in the night...
...novel's title is an allusion to Sinclair Lewis' The Man Who Knew Coolidge,* which Barney read at 14. At 40, he now admits that "nothing stayed with me but the title." And James quickly makes clear that he is no Lewis-style caricature of a Babbitt businessman. As the head of a New England wood-products factory, he has a fierce and principled pride in the quality of what he makes and in the dignity of the men who work for him. His resources as a human being are as varied as the generation...
...Barney James is, in sum, a man well worth knowing, and he establishes an instant, easy rapport with his audience. Through Barney's memories-the flashbacks are as elegantly managed as anything since James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possessed-the reader comes to know Dave Doremus, the man who knew Kennedy...
...comes to ruin in marriage, in business, and finally in life. In the end he commits suicide, having expended his gifts unwisely, particularly his second wife, a mentally unstable and drug-ridden singer. Though Kennedy's fate and Doremus' have far different origins, the twice-bereaved Barney finds a bleak common moral: "Every man, even the most blessed, needs a little more than average luck to survive this world...