Word: chaser
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Shearer ladles blame and caustic wit on the President, his G.O.P. posse and the moralizing TV newsies with their "hideously bad acting." It's a smart challenge to lazy thinking. Along with another acerb little volume, Gore Vidal's The American Presidency, it can be taken as an ideal chaser to the recent binge of Monicaholism. Hemlock, anyone...
...most of his career, nobody thought of Sammy Sosa as a legend chaser. The amiable but erratic Chicago Cubs outfielder was better known for throwing to the wrong bases and stealing at impractical times. Same thing at bat: flailing wildly, the power hitter seemed to go for the fences with every swing. Result: last year he struck out more than anyone in the National League...
...with such universal themes as a mother's love, obstacles overcome, misunderstandings resolved, the cuteness of puppies and the boundless wisdom of children. The cumulative effect is overwhelming. Imagine a bath in strawberry shortcake. Imagine a meal of chocolate eclairs. With a Napoleon for dessert. And a milk-shake chaser...
...either airbrushed from America's literary canvas or painted with hackneyed strokes. While a smattering of books have attempted to redress this problem, among them Jill Nelson's 1993 memoir, Volunteer Slavery, the lives of these women beg for further elaboration. Happily, Nelson's new memoir, Straight, No Chaser (Putnam; 225 pages; $23.95), and Gwendolyn M. Parker's Trespassing (Houghton Mifflin; 209 pages; $23) provide some of the missing detail...
...problem is David Thompson's book, with its tired cocktail of characters left over from They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, and an odd Twilight Zone chaser. Karen Ziemba combines Broadway pizazz with shy-girl vulnerability as a contestant who partners a stunt pilot (Daniel McDonald) but is secretly married to the marathon's slimy emcee (Gregory Harrison). The mix of nostalgia, cynicism and period artifice, however, keeps us at arm's length from the material (beware of any show in which one character calls another "Flyboy"). The ersatz-'30s numbers are pleasant but forgettable, although Debra Monk...