Word: cogan
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...commit politics." Higgins focuses on Congressional aide Hank Cavanaugh, a peripheral figure to the bigger, surrounding story of the '76 Democratic pre-convention campaign. Higgins is telling a tale of action from the view of a man with little room to act, a man like Eddie Coyle and Jackie Cogan of the earlier novels. The crime novels never showed the big bosses; A City on a Hill never directly presents the man Cavanaugh's boss wants to make president. Keeping within his narrow limits, Higgins manages to smooth his way past the improbability of a second-term Cape-Cod congressman...
Laura Quinn, fortyish, opens her suburban Boston home to Jim Cogan, 17, the son of Bronx relatives. He is awaiting arraignment in New York, charged with involvement in a lunatic guru's plot to blow up the public library. His future is on the line. If she hopes to persuade him to change, Laura realizes, she will have to put her past on the line...
...predictable: Matron meets the Son of Counterculture. Laura obediently bridles at the "spiritual onanism that leads these fools, these mindless children, to glorify themselves, or the self and its own ignorance." She is also physically stirred by Cogan, a shaggy "Montaigne in love beads, discarding whole areas of Western culture that do not serve him." Laura counterattacks with her "small focus of self-knowledge, the sweep of history," watches her admonitions founder against his coltish arrogance and her own proliferating self-doubts...
...disappointed lawyer-politician now resigned to tinkering with the Massachusetts Democratic Party machine. In come Jim's parents, a bewildered, gin-swilling mother and a gambling father off on a lifetime losing streak. The cast swells to include an Italian immigrant, a Jewish real estate tycoon and assorted Cogan relatives. Without warning, what might have been just another serving of tea and sympathy has become a documentary on U.S. civilization and its discontents...
...Cogan's Trade, Higgins...