Word: difficult
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nostalgia is what we like today: warm, a bit muzzy, with lots of generalizing dips back into a past full of evocative stage props and period business. Memory is another matter. Remembering truthfully is as difficult as inventing well -- indeed, more so; hence the paucity of good memoirs. "You must never undertake the search for time lost," warns the last sentence of Gregor von Rezzori's The Snows of Yesteryear, "in the spirit of nostalgic tourism." The rest of the book shows how carefully he has obeyed this precept...
...humor and a vigilant eye for nuances of love and indifference, language, landscape and class behavior. It is not a young man's (or a moralist's) book. But it is intensely moving and contains, in its winding and ironic cadences, not a slack sentence: a performance in a difficult key about the making of a near extinct kind of European...
Some Freaks, like the author's previous collection of commentary, Writing in Restaurants, is a break from the demands of a difficult craft. It is also a chance for the playwright to mouth off and strike a number of disparate poses: the poker-playing resident of Vermont, the city boy who likes London tea shops, the gunner who belongs to both the N.R.A. and the A.C.L.U. and the provocateur who holds that women have no instinct for compromise and negotiation. Ranging widely, Mamet allows that "I am, by nature and profession, a browser." With the expanded confidence that comes with...
...this summer investigators discovered that a few generic-drug developers had bribed underpaid FDA employees to speed up the agency's responses to the paperwork for their products. Three FDA reviewers have already pleaded guilty, and more prosecutions are expected. "This past year has been one of the most difficult in FDA's history," said Commissioner Frank Young last week...
...third time in this century the old order is crumbling in Europe, and the world waits anxiously for a new one to be born. The transition promises to be long, difficult and hazardous. But rarely if ever has the vision of a peaceful and relatively free Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals seemed so palpably within grasp. Thus 1989 is destined to join other dates in history -- 1918 and 1945 -- that schoolchildren are required to remember, another year when an era ended, in this case the 44-year postwar period, which is closing with the rapid unraveling...