Word: boyhoods
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...star. It was to command this dream girl's attention that he shot the President. Awaiting trial early this year, at which his lawyers will plead insanity, Hinckley, alone in a Maryland stockade cell, now has only himself to hurt; twice he has attempted suicide. Agca, after a boyhood of rural Turkish poverty, attended two universities and eventually joined a gang of young fascist thugs in Istanbul. In their thrall he became a practiced assassin two years before his descent on Rome. Agca's motive was nominally political ("A protest against imperialism," he claimed) but had only...
...conservative Senator Jesse Helms, the assignment involved a return to familiar ground as well. Atlanta Bureau Chief Joseph Boyce set out to reconstruct Helms' early political background by interviewing the Senator's friends and associates in the North Carolina capital of Raleigh and in Helms' boyhood home of Monroe. Boyce was well suited to assess the small-town rhythms of Monroe, with its old courthouse dominating the square and its passion for politics; he was reared in the very similar town of Danville, Ill., seat of the legendary Speaker of the House Joe Cannon. Says Boyce: "Politics...
Helms spent the next seven years in a happy humdrum, working as executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association. The job paid well, and it also introduced him to the state's corporate Establishment, which found Helms a right-thinking young apprentice. (A curious pattern: small-town boyhood, radio sports reporter, business p.r. man. Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms...
...Commission for the Ministry of Justice," has died, apparently by suicide, after seeming to confess to bribe taking. Halleck's two nearly grown children, drug-frazzled Kirsten and lard-witted Owen, vow to wreak vengeance on their gorgeous mother Isabel, and their father's best friend from boyhood, whom they take to be the killers. Here, as elsewhere, the author has far more energy than her characters, who sag into torpor when she busies herself with other scenes and lurch groggily back into motion when she summons them again...
...book. The reader is trapped for lengthy incoherent chapters in the minds of Owen and his sister, specimens who would have a psychiatrist looking at his watch well before the end of each 50-minute hour. The only breaks come in equally long and profitless flashbacks to the boyhood of Maurice Halleck. The writing here is of the "It was a dark and stormy night" variety that Snoopy, the Peanuts dog, concocts whenever he tries to write his own novel. Halleck and his friend take a canoe trip, and he is nearly drowned in "the deafening roar" of the wild...