Word: battlefield
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Nightingale's Song cannily differentiates its five main characters, whose portraits have a novelistic fascination. North, for example: an authentic battlefield hero (brave, focused, cool under fire) who is also a hot dog and, suggests Timberg, perhaps unhinged in some surreal way that involves a dangerous mix of self-dramatization and stupidity. McCain: a raunchy screw-up and party boy who graduated near the bottom of his Annapolis class but magnificently rose to the occasion later. Poindexter: a brilliant student at the Naval Academy who suffered afterward, in Timberg's rendering, from a blind-side naivete about politics. McFarlane...
Neither McCain nor Webb had anything to do with Iran-contra. Webb, another true battlefield hero (Navy Cross, Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts), was no hot dog but rather, in many ways, the smartest and best of the bunch. After the typically bitter homecoming from the war, he forged a career as a novelist, writing the best battlefield novel of Vietnam, Fields of Fire. During the Reagan Administration, he had a brief and stormy tenure as Secretary of the Navy...
...answer is, the bosses of the major film studios. Compared with them, Stallone and his fellow summer-movie heroes--those mean-eyed, pumped-up, epigram-expectoratin' cinema studs--are prissy little honor-roll students. The real tough guys are fellows named Semel and Pollock and Roth; their battlefield is the summer calendar; they show their guts by slotting their big pictures to open in just the right week in hopes of killing the competition. This is the art of war, New Hollywood-style...
Revealing the paradoxes inherent in promoting wartime weapons development, Hershberg writes that Conant told Harvard students in 1943: "Let us freely admit that the battlefield is no place to question the doctrine that the end justifies the means, but let us insist...with all our power, that this same doctrine must be republicated...in times of peace...
...only is there conflict between the Scots and the British, but also between the nobles and the commoners. Traditionally the British king would bribe Scottish nobles into abandoning the battlefield before the war could begin. But in this case, William (a mere plebian) rides insolently into the discussion and starts the war with a few remarks that he must have learned at recess in Scottish elementary school. When they finally get down to fighting, the camera dips and swoops through the battlefield, careening realistically through the carnage...