Word: caper
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This assault on the free enterprise system is devastatingly successful, and so, despite its complexities, is the author's handling of the caper. Its most memorable victim is Granada Masterman, Gudge's lumpy half-sister, who has built a door-to-door beauty-products business into an army of 14,000 Masterwomen that resembles more a religious cult than the Avon sorority. Granada aims to buy her way to social acceptance via the stock market and art patronage, and Thomas' depiction of the scramble of ars gratia ego is both deeply knowledgeable and unnerving...
...sports fan briefly described here spent a year working on his spiral pass as a result of his little caper, and you will get the boot for less-obvious academic violations as well. Harvard takes these stipulations more seriously than it does rules about party notes. Perhaps the most famous disciplining of the past 5o years involved none other than the current senior U.S. Senator from the Bay State. Young Ted Kennedy '54 (but actually '56) didn't feel up for a Spanish exam and had a buddy take it for him. Only Ted decided to spend the morning munching...
...plays a Governor of Texas known for his ability to float away from difficult issues in a cloud of obfuscating verbiage. For Burning this obviously represents the opportunity of a hard-working lifetime, and the high-strutting job he does, the pleased-with-himself energy he brings to his caper through the rotunda of the state Capitol, is utterly infectious...
...culminated a cloak-and-data caper extraordinaire, the FBI's most ambitious sting since Operation Abscam netted seven Congressmen for taking bribes two years ago. Glenmar was an FBI front operation set up to deal with the problem of industrial espionage in the fast-track microelectronics industry. Winding up investigations that lasted eight months...
...current caper revives SPECTRE, the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, which Bond supposedly felled years ago, along with its malevolent leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. SPECTRE is determined this time around to gain control of outer space. Its machinations include a wave of hijackings for huge ransoms and the manufacture of ice cream spiked with a mind-bending drug. Bond and the luscious daughter of an old colleague man age to penetrate the organization's 150-sq.-mi. Texas ranch headquarters, only to face death at the hands of killer ants, man-eating pythons and other unfriendlies...