Word: bennette
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William John Bennett was born in 1943 in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. He was only four when his father, a mid-level bank employee, divorced his mother. Young Bill was an introverted child, seldom talking and always reading. His older brother Bob (now a celebrated Washington criminal lawyer for, among others, President Clinton) did the arguing and fighting for the two of them...
...Bennett, though frank and provocative, has a keen sense of marketing and showmanship. While he upholds the value of religious faith, he distinguishes himself from TV evangelists and reaches a larger audience by keeping his discussion of virtues accessible even to secular readers and listeners. Reared an Irish Catholic Democrat in a broken home in Brooklyn, New York, he marries the instincts and grammar of a populist to the convictions of a social conservative. And he blends intellectual sweep with the physical presence of a prizefighter. It makes for quite a package. His speeches shift seamlessly from anecdotes told...
...Many of Bennett's themes resonate with boomer parents who were '60s liberals but now seek an antidote to the antisocial, materialist messages their children are absorbing from popular culture. And as someone who himself played guitar in a rock band, had a date with Janis Joplin, opposed the Vietnam War and campaigned for civil rights in Mississippi, Bennett demonstrates through his personal journey how far America has moved during the past three decades on cultural issues...
Their mother Nancy Walsh, a medical secretary, moved the family to Washington when Bill was 12 and entrusted him to the Jesuit fathers of Gonzaga High School, where he became the only honor student to start on the football team. Bennett accepted a scholarship to Williams College in Massachusetts, where he planned vaguely to study advertising. He played football, joined a fraternity and hauled furniture in the summers to meet expenses. But then, Bennett recalls, he enrolled in a philosophy course taught by a gifted professor, Laszlo Versenyi, and "fell in love with the stuff...
After Williams, Bennett entered the University of Texas as a doctoral candidate in political philosophy under the brilliant and ferocious John Silber. It was at Texas that Bennett was able to arrange a blind date, after one of her concerts, with hard-living singer Joplin. He recalls only that she seemed "sad" and envied his life as a graduate student...