Word: deaths
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...junta was also trying to mop up diehard remnants of Somoza's national guard. Almost every night the sounds of gunfire shattered the stillness of Managua as Sandinista security men battled renegade guardsmen. Egged on by a Masaya mob that demanded the death of its prisoner, Sandinista troops summarily executed a 19-year-old informer who had admitted leading Somoza's assassination squads to the hideouts of at least 20 guerrillas during the civil war. New York Democratic Congressman John Murphy, a longtime friend of Somoza's, claimed that the Sandinistas were executing "thousands" of guardsmen...
...Though President Carter dispatched a five-ship Seventh Fleet task force to pick up whatever boat people it could find, the Navy rescue mission was temporarily halted after twelve days, when the 150 m.p.h. winds of Typhoon Hope whipped the South China Sea into a cauldron of death. Some 443 Vietnamese aboard three junks barely made it to Hong Kong after being pushed back to sea from Macao by Portuguese officials the day before the storm...
...strong optimism about leadership. Followers persist in the belief that crises produce leaders, in the way that the blitz produced Churchill. But obviously, leadership does not arise automatically, mystically, from need. The Hittites and Mayas went into crisis, and no leaders could rescue them from their extinction. The Black Death swept across the 14th century, and nobody came forward to lead men out of their chaotic misery...
...book are straightforward. A suburb of Auckland, N.Z., is dominated by a North American-style shopping mall called Heaven-field-"a huge windowless pretence, as much an insinuation of Elsewhere as its own name or that of the city or the restaurant, Manhattan, as its entrance." Baltimore, Md., death place of Edgar Allan Poe, is recognizable, with its gray asphalt, red brick and black iron gratings, as are the affluent hills of Berkeley. "passing through a 'wilderness' phase where it was fashionable to let meadow grass and herbs grow as they pleased, and the wild creatures come...
Tension and tears are constant. But there are moments of triumph as well: the completion of A Bridge Too Far, published two months before the author's death; the night Ryan conducts the orchestra in a local production of Finian's Rainbow star ring his daughter Vicki...