Word: basses
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Working as an associate at the Wall Street law firm of Bass and Marshall is a curious sort of servitude. The associates are liveried in Brooks Brothers suits, their glass-box sweatshop has Oriental rugs, and the minimum wage is $27,000 a year. If they slave night and day for eight years, they may ascend to partnership and gain the privilege of exploiting other associates. Along the way, their brains turn into stuffed briefcases, and their souls are lost to mean ambition...
...with a firm like the fictional Bass and Marshall is the reward for successful grade grubbing at a good law school, which John Jay Osborn Jr. wrote about with wit and feeling in his first novel, The Paper Chase. Hart, the hero of that book, "learned to love the law," an ironic expression of Harvard Law School students. He also learned to hate the way law students stabbed each other to succeed at it. In Osborn's new expose. The Associates, Samuel Weston, fresh from Harvard Law School, shares those passions. In Weston's lofty view, work...
...isolated passages of The Associates, Osborn conveys a familiarity with soft-carpeted power and a fascination with contract law, the translation of human reliance into legal principles. But the officers of Bass and Marshall are little more than caricatures. Their eyeballs are forever bulging, and they communicate with associates chiefly by hissing. One partner fancies himself as a sea captain, and enters securities litigation with commands like "Blast them. Send them down in an instant with all hands on board." Cosmo Bass, the formidable autocrat who runs the firm, could have been another Kingsfield, the Paper Chase professor. Unfortunately, Weston...
...cold war freelance couriers began systematic efforts to smuggle books to Christians in Eastern Europe. Today Bible smuggling is carried on by a network of at least 40 Protestant organizations pursuing the world's most extraordinary missionary venture. Much support comes from U.S.-based organizations, notably L. Joe Bass's Underground Evangelism and Michael Wurmbrand's Jesus to the Communist World. At any one time, dozens of smugglers, both professionals and one-shot amateurs, may be crossing borders in Bible-bearing cars, vans or trains. The Bibles are given out free, paid for by Western contributors...
...operations now seems threatened by scandal in the U.S. Underground Evangelism and Jesus to the Communist World have lately struggled in a bitter and squalid feud run out of their California headquarters. The battle involves a $1.5 million defamation suit rising from charges and countercharges made by Wurmbrand about Bass's personal behavior, and it threatens to spread to questions about Bass's ways of accounting for some of the $8.7 million a year his group raises. The situation could take years to untangle. The two organizations together depend on contributions and account for nearly $17 million...