Word: committed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...debt to Vietnam--too many Vietnamese, like many of the Americans sent to stop their revolution, are beyond the reach of debtors and creditors alike. It is more a matter of earning the astonishing friendship so many Vietnamese have expressed towards an American people that let its government commit barbarities in its name, or of recovering the self-respect endangered by 15 years in which politicians appealed instead to national pride in order to justify...
Somehow we who are young and live in this nation, 2000 years later must find a mixture of Christ's compassion and understanding, but also his clean anger, his willingness to commit his energies in a struggle on behalf of the downtrodden of this world...
...like your Essay. The area of the world in which the U.S. should be "prepared to commit itself seems to have shrunk drastically in the past 14 years. Is this because "the world changed," or is it because our wisdom and resolve have also shrunk? At this rate, maybe in another 14 years a TIME Essay will give a new list of "top priorities": Washington, D.C., New York City, Cape Cod, Miami Beach. I preferred Kennedy's inaugural pledge...
...Higgins has shifted to--as he liked to say of the Nixontan criminals who appeared in his two Watergate articles for The Atlantic--"people who 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...
...SPONTANEITY of his characters is important to Higgins; thus the feeling that they "happen to commit" their actions, or his statement two weeks ago on Chicago radio that he "wrote this book to find out what happened to the characters I introduced on page one." Suddenly Higgins is the American Simenon, starting from a set of tensions, writing with no end in sight--and writing at a deadly pace (ten days for the first draft of A City on a Hill, compared to the eleven days Simenon spends on slightly shorter books). His trick is that he writes almost nothing...