Word: bravura
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Come. When a really bravura performance is required, it is likely to come from the man most responsible for the Nixon invitation, Premier Chou Enlai. The latest example came during the 31-day visit to China by a group of 15 graduate students from the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars-all Americans, and all characteristic of the growing body of U.S. scholars who are strongly sympathetic to the Maoist experiment in China (see EDUCATION). Chou was at his best, showing genuine private warmth toward the students, but public firmness bordering on hostility to their government. For the benefit...
...such charge can be brought against Doctorow's bravura effort. The Book of Daniel, transparently based on the Rosenberg case, is a bold novel that, all things considered, is surprisingly successful. Doctorow's biggest gamble was sinking his energies into the Rosenberg case in the first place. Not that successful fiction cannot spring from old newspapers, as Dostoevsky and Dreiser both demonstrated. But the Rosenberg trial was a kind of drawn-out, draining and rather grisly national ordeal...
...while railing at the pasteboard void, Rosen also admits to having learned to play its games with a real sense of bravura. Gassed on the streets of Chicago during the '68 demonstrations, Rosen's mind flashes from childhood memories of cajoling his parent's friends with smiles and jokes and pleasant words to playing the martyr scenes for the sake of the familiar suburban mother-type behind the oversized wheel of the Camaro before which he stumbles in temporary confusion. "I am so accustomed to my mastery of mothers that this sudden and irritating turn of events unnerves...
Built into the very timber and structure, the energy and bravura of the sixties' new journalism, there has always been such cultural one-up-man ship. As readers of Esquire and New York, we might not be all that very different from the type of personalities we read about, but just the plain and simple fact of the situation, that a writer should be guiding us through a critical evaluation- however obliquely that criticism might be made- seemed to suggest our own superiority. It certainly contributed to our self-consciousness. And as long as we were conscious of our foibles...
...look like cowboys. The women can't hide that they are whores. And beneath the gilt and bravura, the blue hair and mascara green and shiny sharkskin suits, there is the most frightening exhaustion imaginable...