Word: bettering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Your story "Peace: Risks and Rewards" [March 26] was notable for its failure to mention any rewards for Americans. Will this peace between Israel and Egypt better our relations with the U.S.S.R. or decelerate Moscow's growing influence over its neighbors, increase our access to energy sources, reduce our rate of inflation, improve our balance of payments, help balance our budget or increase our national security...
Fine, a Rhodes scholar, also praised Harvard's approach to athletics. "We strive to be the best, but we are not just athletes. We are student-athletes. That's a better indicator of the success of the program than the won-loss record," he said...
...Better late than never...
Fuentes, as in his others works, does not develop his characters any better than he explains why they exist or what exactly they are doing. Maldonado is the only three-dimensional protagonist--a confused middle-aged stud who resembles a Velasco painting. Maldonado's triad of women--the seductive Mary, loyal Rebecca and unattainable Sarah--fill the traditional female novelistic roles of whore, mother and virgin. Maldonado's purposeless orders come from two spies, the nationless Timon and the clove-smelling Lebanese Ayub, and a Mexican economics professor Bernstein and the bullying Director General. The only thing which binds...
Fuentes is better suited to writing international thrillers than to his previous domestic historical novels. The Hydra Head is his tightest piece of writing--perhaps because he is writing about something he knows more about. His past raptures on Indians and condemnations of fellow members of the powerful cosmopolitan bourgeoisie seemed insincere. Writing about a highly-sexed group of jet-setters rather than peasants seems to come more naturally to Fuentes...