Word: clan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Their adventures, with Paulie always fouling up and Charlie always covering up, are intricately and surprisingly plotted by Screenwriter Vincent Patrick, adapting his own novel. He has a fine, unforced understanding of how clan loyalties work, a bemused acceptance of corruption as a natural part of New York City's municipal style, and a sharp sense of how Irish and Italian ethics and ethnics mesh to mutual advantage and grind to mutual exasperation. In Rourke, with his alert inwardness, and Roberts, with his burbling extraversion (as opposed to his work in Star 80 as it is possible...
...author-it is also very fast and shrewd, one of the funniest books of the year. Much of the time, Didion seems to be laughing at her own romantic yearnings. Her heroine resembles a paper cutout Jackie Kennedy. Inez Christian Victor is the daughter of a rich, mercantile Hawaiian clan and the wife of a dashing Democratic Senator who wants to be President. In her daily life, Inez must contend with a randy husband, his groupies ("Girls like that come with the life") and standard-issue disaffected children (Jessie shoots heroin, Adlai maims people in car crashes). The harsh glare...
...press lives by politicians. This symbiotic relationship is at the center of our national life. The relationship has always existed. Probably it came into being at about the same time as human speech, which permitted the first gossip to repeat the (suitably edited) sayings of the chief of the clan to the people in the next cave. It existed in America, an especially nourishing environment for all types of communication, before the Declaration of Independence...
They developed clan loyalties like those of Highland Scotland, complete with tales of heroism and treachery. The legacy of the Crusades even now is reflected in the snipings, kidnapings and crossfire that recur in the mountains between Christian and Muslim militias. Part of this legacy is a penchant for violence, a belief that the gun as much as the cross is a source of salvation. Says Professor Majid Fakhri of the American University of Beirut: "There is something very medieval about the Christian outlook. A type of feudalism exists in which politics and religion are intertwined in a literal...
...that success has not made Donoso cautious. His new novel takes major risks. It does without a strong central character around whom the action can revolve. It offers instead the Ventura family: seven adults and their spouses plus 33 children ranging in age from six to 16. This clan spends every summer at Marulanda, a magnificent, fenced-in estate, with a vast plain outside stretching to the horizon in all directions. Barely visible are the blue mountains beyond, where laborers who are virtual slaves mine the Ventura gold...