Word: bookings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Gingrich may find himself caught in an ethics scandal similar to Wright's. One of the main charges against Wright is that he used an unusual royalty arrangement for his book, Reflections of a Public Man, to get around limitations on campaign contributions. The book was sold primarily in bulk to such political supporters as the Teamsters Union and Washington lobbyist John White. The Speaker pocketed a 55% royalty. The Ethics Committee is expected to release next week a potentially damning report on Wright's activities...
Gingrich employed a different device. According to the Washington Post, he persuaded 21 supporters to contribute $105,000 to promote Window of Opportunity, a book on the "American future" that the Georgian co-authored in 1984 with his wife Marianne and a science fiction writer, David Drake. Though the book sold only 12,000 hard-cover copies and failed to make a profit for its publisher, the investors reaped tax benefits for their contributions. They also paid Marianne Gingrich nearly $10,000 for her efforts. Gingrich admitted last week that his book deal was "as weird as Wright...
This eye-popping blurb -- about a dictionary, no less -- may seem a bit of a stretcher. But the Oxford English Dictionary is not just another reference book, an arcane preserve of scholars and authors, like Burgess, who use language to make their livings. Since its completion in 1928, exactly 71 years after it was proposed at a meeting of the Philological Society in London, the OED has stood as the ultimate authority on the tongue of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, not to mention the language of tradespeople and the slang of the streets. Relatively few speakers of English...
...gone gay all of a sudden!" yelled Cary Grant, dressed in a frilly robe, as he met a nosy visitor in the comedy Bringing Up Baby. Perhaps he wasn't trying to be funny. A new book on Grant insists that he was bisexual and had a fling with -- goodness gracious! -- Howard Hughes. He also spied for Britain and used LSD. Charles Higham and Roy Moseley, authors of Cary Grant: The Lonely Heart, write, "The honest biographer cannot shirk the painful truth, even at the risk of being called deliberately sensationalist." Some risks are no risks...
...Chinese-American culture is only beginning to throw off such literary sparks, and Amy Tan's bright, sharp-flavored first novel belongs on a short shelf dominated by Maxine Hong Kingston's remarkable works of a decade or so ago, The Woman Warrior and China Men. Tan's book is a wry group portrait of four elderly and feisty women who emigrated from China to the U.S., and their grown, very Americanized daughters. "A girl is like a young tree," says one of the stern mothers, who explains to her daughter that she lacks the necessary wood in her character...