Word: berlin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Vice President George Bush was in West Berlin, the Communist-encircled outpost where American leaders often enjoy ovations. In the mirrored ballroom of the Inter-Continental Hotel, his delivery was crisp, almost inspirational, as he told some 650 politicians, businessmen and military officers what they wanted to hear. "We are not preparing to fight a nuclear war. We are preparing to deter war. An attack on you is an attack on us." The U.S., said Bush, is ready "to consider and explore any and all reasonable Soviet offers at the negotiating table in Geneva...
...SALVADOR. By the standards of El Salvador's tortuous three-year civil war, the first signs of the impending debacle were small ones. As some 70 members of the country's National Police guarded the once bustling agricultural center of Berlin (pop. about 30,000), guerrillas launched a cautious nighttime raid. For an hour small-arms fire popped back and forth between the opposing forces. Then the guerrillas slipped away into the surrounding cotton and coffee fields of Usulután, one of El Salvador's richest and most strategic departments...
...BERLIN DOES NOT NEGLECT the literary analysis necessary for a complete review of the dramatist. He devotes worthwhile space to examining the relationships between the characters in Long Day's Journey, presenting the two "parties" of the family, the two without illnesses who debate blame back and forth, and the Ill pair constantly trying to escape reality. He takes a more scholarly view as well, comparing O'Neill's use--and modern drama's--of alcohol and drugs for truth telling to the Elizabethans' similar use of madness. He emphasizes O'Neill's Beckettian use of time; the play progresses...
This thorough synthesis makes up for the most superficial treatments of some other plays later in the book. Tidbits from studies of Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra and The Iceman Cometh provide occasional flashes of insight, so do a few of the details from Berlin's otherwise sketchy treatment of O'Neill's life--for instance, the young playwright was kicked out of Princeton for throwing a rock through the window of then-president Woodrow Wilson. And describing the disease' which made O'Neill's hands shake for the last decade of his life--effectively cutting...
That element is Berlin's major strength. He does not only give us a narrow, well-defined text about O'Neill. Rather, he sacrifices a small amount of detail and scope to share with us the cardinal doctrines of O'Neill's philosophy, With this purpose in mind. Berlin is able to use evidence from Greek tragedy. Nietzsche's Dionysian philosophy and Freudian psychology to touch that fog that surrounded O'Neill. Though, as Berlin himself admits, his subject "wrote with a burning intensity that eludes description or analysis," that broadened picture makes the book worthwhile. O'Neill gazed into...