Word: brief
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Eunice Kennedy and Sargent Shriver, is a second-term Maryland state legislator. Bobby's daughter Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is that state's Lieutenant Governor. Her brother Joe II was a six-term Congressman from J.F.K.'s old Boston district before he retired from politics last year after a brief bid for the Massachusetts governorship...
...just gone through two public embarrassments. His ex-wife Sheila Rauch Kennedy had published a book in which she claimed that he had improperly used his influence with the Catholic Church to have their 12-year marriage annulled. And his brother Michael, who was managing Joe's brief campaign for Governor, was in the news for having carried on a long affair with the family baby sitter that allegedly started when she was 14. As the scandal was moving off the front pages, Michael died in a freak ski accident...
History denies this, of course. Among prominent summer deaths, one recalls those of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, whose lives seemed equally brief and complete. Writers cannot bear the fact that poet John Keats died at 26, and only half playfully judge their own lives as failures when they pass that year. The idea that the life cut short is unfulfilled is illogical because lives are measured by the impressions they leave on the world and by their intensity and virtue. What one learns of the man suggests that John F. Kennedy Jr. led a very good life indeed...
Among the best new collections are two that loosely chronicle the immigrant experience: Gish Jen's Who's Irish? (Knopf; 208 pages; $22) and Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner; 198 pages; $12). Lahiri has a gift for illuminating the full meaning of brief relationships--with lovers, family friends, those met in travel. A more lasting bond--the one between fathers and daughters--is elegantly explored in Bliss Broyard's My Father, Dancing...
...fullness of communal American life into contact with the river. They simply oppose anyone destroying the river. "This is a fight to save a resource for as many constituencies as possible," says Kennedy. "Here there is room for everyone." As he speaks, a trio of ducks puts on a brief air show high above the electrical wires that cross the river. A great blue heron is spotted over the Lovett plant...