Word: deaths
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...they are satisfied with their health dropped from 61% in the 1970s to 55% in the mid-1980s. Americans seem to be on the verge of becoming, as Physician- Philosopher Lewis Thomas warned nearly a decade ago, "a nation of healthy hypochondriacs, living gingerly, worrying ourselves half to death...
What is it about baseball that lends itself so naturally to metaphors of germ and birth, decline and death? Some might point to the statistical exactitude of the season, the precise accounting of hits and errors, the joyous regeneration of starting each spring with a clean slate and an unblemished record. On the playing level, baseball is the meritocracy to which the rest of America might aspire -- a pristine universe where performance matters more than pedigree and connections are what occur when a hurled spheroid encounters a swung hickory stick...
...John Kennedy's death stunned the nation, it almost crazed some people in Massachusetts. Those who had been close to Kennedy, in fact or by association, felt as if the bullet had struck them -- people in Brookline, where Kennedy was born; in Boston, his political base; in state politics, still charged with the energies of his election. Michael Dukakis, born and raised in Brookline, was serving his first term in the legislature; he was among those exposed to the sharpest sense of loss. He had pointed to Kennedy's career as a model for his own -- written college advice...
...only do we watch the virus eat away Amanda's life, but we also watch it destroy the lives of her family and her friends. Polly and Ivan begin to argue and then cease to communicate at all, as each parent tries to justify his daughter's death. Charlie retreats into his own thoughts when his best friend's mother refuses to let Servin play with him anymore because she feels her son might catch AIDS from touching Charlie's hand...
Despite the hopes of Amanda's supporters, of her family and of her friends, no miracle cure for AIDS emerges, and at the end of the novel Amanda is rushed off to Massachussetts Children's Hospital to meet her certain death. The idea that a cure will one day, emerge, however, is strong, and the novel hints that if we can convince society to accept the diseased and work for them instead of against them, then perhaps a cure is possible...