Word: devoto
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Nothing was ordinary about Bernard DeVoto. Even his homeliness was spectacular, compounded of defiantly bulging eyes and a nose broadened in a baseball accident. Girls from Ogden, Utah, remembered him all their lives as "the ugliest, most disagreeable boy you ever saw." Also the smartest...
Legends surrounded his beginnings. His mother breast-fed him until he was past two. His father taught him to read before he was three, with the help of Pope's translation of the Iliad. It was as if DeVoto were his own tall tale, a product-in-exaggeration of the American frontier that he loved above all to write about until his death...
Have effete Eastern intellectuals underestimated this whoop-it-up Westerner who often behaved, as his biographer admits, like "the illegitimate offspring of H.L. Mencken and Annie Oakley"? Wallace Stegner, novelist (The Big Rock Candy Mountain), Stanford professor, and a fellow native of Utah, concedes that DeVoto was often wrong as well as "spectacularly right." He was also an 'Implacable showoff" who "set world records for taking himself seriously." But yes, says Stegner, DeVoto has been low-rated, chiefly because he ran with no coterie, and in fact ran head down against most of the opinion makers...
That night, 40,000 guerrilla sympathizers threatened to storm Buenos Aires' Villa Devoto prison unless all political prisoners were pardoned. Cámpora, who had promised conditional amnesty, caved in. About 500 prisoners in ten jails were released. Among them: Carlos Maguid, a guerrilla who in 1970 kidnaped and murdered former President Pedro Aramburu...
...sooner were the freed prisoners on the streets and vowing to "revenge the revolution" than a rumor spread that more political prisoners were still inside Villa Devoto. With that, the crowd stormed the gates and the guards opened fire, leaving two dead, nine wounded. Their authority compromised, government officials subsequently found themselves in the ludicrous position of having to haggle with all kinds of prisoners, including psychopathic murderers who demanded that they be released from a Buenos Aires asylum...