Word: doorstop
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Entering the doors is like sliding into a jump rope game at the right time, between the rope hitting the floor and it hitting you in the face. Do you wait or do you rush? If you rush, you can become a human doorstop. If you wait, you're left hanging for a full rotation. Bea Beaulieu, a Science Center security guard who has been navigating the spinners for years, holds the secret to the rotating doors. "You have to scoot," she says, doing a sample "scoot" dance in her Wackenhut uniform. To "scoot," you need to be in tune...
...boozy New York Times reporter; Cyrus, the piano-playing coachman; the redoubtable Isaacson detective brothers; and Stevie, the reformed street urchin, who later, as a grown man, narrates the adventure. (His urchin usage is not unfailingly convincing, as in "I remember reading in The Principles of Psychology, that doorstop of a book--what Professor William James had written...and which I'd fought my way through...") Teddy Roosevelt, as before, is a bully minor character, though here he is Assistant Secretary of the Navy, not New York City police commissioner. And in a brilliant bit of historical casting, Clarence Darrow...
This Whitehurst guy is Frederic Whitehurst, the FBI chemist who originally blew the whistle on the FBI lab in 1989 and helped launch an inquiry that finally resulted last week in a blistering report from the Justice Department's inspector general. Michael Bromwich released a 600-page doorstop charging that some FBI forensic operations had been sloppy and biased. But even before the verdict was reached, Whitehurst's treatment as a whistle-blower raised questions about the FBI's ability to manage dissent. At first, lab managers dismissed his complaints about colleagues' work as prickly perfectionism. They suspended...
...being sold. Aghast that it was valued at a mere $300 to $500, she and her husband went to the auction and bought it back--not before fighting off others to the tune of $1,400. "We didn't want to see it used as a doorstop or sold as scrap," she said...
...Another doorstop-size novel from Herman Wouk...