Word: casey
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...bonkers biopic are two people John Belushi never met during his brief, explosive life: Bob Woodward, the actor's biographer, and John Belushi dead. You have to cherish the daredevil idiocy of a movie whose climax is a parody of Woodward's legendary deathbed chat with CIA director William Casey. The journalist visits the hotel room where Belushi took his fatal overdose and hallucinates an interview with the dying star. "Breathe for me, Woodward!" the samurai comic cries. And it's hard to hate a docudrama in which Cathy Smith, Belushi's last drug source, materializes in the straight-arrow...
Before long, the man from nowhere (he was, in fact, briefly a reporter for ABC in Viet Nam, and was said to have ties to Asian businessmen who were paying for his house, two bodyguards and Mercedes) had reportedly been host to John Mitchell and William Casey, journalists Ted Koppel and William Safire, and several Congressmen. By 1982 he had served enough lamb chops to merit a profile in the New York Times. The story trumpeted his ability to open doors all over town, even though the paper could not quite put its finger on who he was. It called...
...seafaring inevitably carry a ballast of symbolism. Shimmering significance goes with the territory: people casting off in the little world of a ship, adrift on a journey at the mercies of the elements and fate. In his second novel -- twelve years after his critically praised An American Romance -- John Casey makes it plain on the opening page that some large issues are going to be entertained. He introduces his hero, Dick Pierce, in a skiff, floating among the creeks and inlets of coastal Rhode Island. In paragraph two, Pierce ponders the marsh grass around him and has an insight: "Only...
These sentences foreshadow nearly everything to come in Spartina, although just how cleverly Casey tips his hand does not become clear until much later. Pierce's family once mattered in this region of Rhode Island, but not any longer. A succession of bad breaks has "squeezed him up Pierce Creek to an acre of scrub," where he lives in a ramshackle house with his wife May and two teenage sons and scrabbles a living as a fisherman. "He'd had a plan: by age 40 he would be master of a ship. Here he was at age 40-plus...
...would seem difficult to root for the success of such an unpleasant character, but Casey artfully provides good reasons for doing so. Pierce's "swamp Yankee" pride is based on a fierce, if sometimes obnoxious, integrity. He does not ask for anything except the chance to make a decent living at what he knows best. The world needs seafood, and Pierce has learned through long experience how to find and catch it. He is, in fact, an archetypal figure in American literature, the little guy at odds with big institutions, battling the triumph of newfangled shoddiness over old traditions...