Word: burrs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...limit at a more reasonable number like 2.3, the national average of children per family. (The .3 would be a party with warm beer and no music). As part of the new leaf, the deans invested the Senior Tutors with additional powers and a new title, Allston Burr Senior Tutor and Dean Wharmer Party-Buster, in honor of the famous dean who brought Faber College's Delta House under control...
Some were busily trying to remove a wiffle ball from a knotted string, others building ducks from tangram "furniture," others diligently working on all 336 combinations of the six-piece burr puzzle, and others intricately involved with the implications of the geometric money puzzle...
...called "The U.S. According to Gore." Vidal's ambitious retelling and revamping of American history began on a modest scale with Washington, D.C. (1967), a novel set in the middle of this century that mixed real and fictional people in a struggle for the nation's soul. Then came Burr (1973), a witty revisionist look at the Founding Fathers, as recorded by Aaron Burr's amanuensis and illegitimate son Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler. In 1876 (1976), an older Schuyler returned home after years of self-imposed exile to witness both the theft of a presidential election and his daughter's cynical...
...nuances will be missed in the process. Vidal's version of American society from 1898 to 1906 comes heavily cross-referenced not only to the historical past but to his other books. For example, the fictional heroine, Caroline Sanford, is Charles Schuyler's granddaughter and thus linked to Burr and 1876; she has an affair with an equally fictional Congressman named James Burden Day, who will one day seek the presidency in Washington...
...even he didn't acquire an empire for us, which you have done." Roosevelt, by contrast, is the "fat little President," a bellicose figure of fun with a falsetto voice, a habit of clicking his "tombstone teeth" and laughing like a "frenzied watchdog." These denigrations largely fall flat. In Burr, Vidal turned a villain into a hero, suggesting that another truth could be found on the dark side of legend; here the issue of Roosevelt's buffoonery hardly matters, since he is portrayed as simply following in the revered McKinley's footsteps...