Word: chamberlain
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These are variations on motherhood's worst-case scenario: you turn your back for a moment or make, under pressure of conflicting emotions, what seems to you only a minor error in judgment, and suddenly your child is snatched from you. For Lindy Chamberlain (Meryl Streep) in A Cry in the Dark, the loss is permanent: she never sees her baby again, alive or dead. For Anna Dunlap (Diane Keaton) in The Good Mother, the outcome is not quite so cruel: she faces losing custody of her daughter Molly, but not the child's death. Yet both mothers find themselves...
Ironically, Chamberlain's story, which is a true one, is infinitely more bizarre, and in the end more emotionally devastating, than Dunlap's, which is adapted from a popular novel. It was precisely because what occurred to Chamberlain one night in 1980 was so improbably eerie, so Stephen Kingish really, that she found herself convicted of murder. With her husband Michael (Sam Neill), her two sons and her nine-week-old baby Azaria, she was in a crowded campsite in the Australian outback. She put the infant to bed in a tent, returned to the barbecue. Shortly, she heard Azaria...
...Abwehr, Germany's secret service, had placed agents in key positions in London, it could not have chosen better than, to name just two, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and his successor, Neville Chamberlain. Indeed, Nazi moles would not have dared to undermine Britain's defenses, diplomatic as well as military, as blatantly as did those two ambitious bumblers. After Hitler marched into the Rhineland in 1936, Baldwin rejected pressure to appoint Churchill as Minister of Defense with the compelling logic that "if I pick Winston, Hitler will be cross." In 1938, after meeting the Fuhrer, the deluded Chamberlain could...
Manchester ends his narrative in June 1940, when even Chamberlain had to admit his error, when France had fallen and the new Prime Minister, Churchill, addressed his imperiled country with an eloquence that was an army in itself. "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: 'This was their finest hour...
...remains a stubborn man: since some hairs won't grow on his head, he mows all of them off. But in ignoring recent calls to vacate the stage -- the loudest coming from Wilt Chamberlain in the bleachers -- Abdul-Jabbar has showed both wisdom and a sense of history. Nobody will have any trouble remembering him at the top of his game, because that's where...