Word: behinds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Adolf Hitler has long been established as the 20th century's Great Satan, the base line of evil; Joseph Stalin, equally monstrous by most objective measures, comes in a distant second--maybe even third behind Pol Pot. One big difference was World War II: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and so Stalin's enormities were courteously minimized in the wartime alliance against Hitler, when the Russian leader became pipe-smoking "Uncle Joe." After that, the demonology never entirely caught up with...
Lourie's novel purports to be a memoir that Stalin left behind, stashed in a crawl space above the room where he died in 1953. In hard, flat, ruthless prose that is also sometimes horribly funny, Lourie's Stalin, supposedly writing in 1938-39, directs an operation to seek out and assassinate his nemesis, Leon Trotsky, then bunkered in Mexico City, raising rabbits and plotting a comeback...
...year later, on Dec. 21, 1956, the day Montgomery's public transportation system was legally integrated) is a study of calm strength. She is looking out the bus window, her hands resting in the folds of her checked dress, while a white man sits, unperturbed, in the row behind her. That clear profile, the neat cloche and eyeglasses and sensible coat--she could have been my mother, anybody's favorite aunt...
...fellows doing what they liked doing, and did, best, and they made an oddly assorted pair. Hillary was tall, lanky, big-boned and long-faced, and he moved with an incongruous grace, rather like a giraffe. He habitually wore on his head a homemade cap with a cotton flap behind, as seen in old movies of the French Foreign Legion. Tenzing was by comparison a Himalayan fashion model: small, neat, rather delicate, brown as a berry, with the confident movements of a cat. Hillary grinned; Tenzing smiled. Hillary guffawed; Tenzing chuckled. Neither of them seemed particularly perturbed by anything...
...wrote this passage on the flight: "Now I've burned the last bridge behind me. All through the storm and darkest night, my instincts were anchored to the continent of North America, as though an invisible cord still tied me to its coasts. In an emergency--if the ice-filled clouds had merged, if oil pressure had begun to drop, if a cylinder had started missing--I would have turned back toward America and home. Now, my anchor is in Europe: on a continent I've never seen... Now, I'll never think of turning back...