Word: doorstop
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...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...
...doorstop best sellers go, Herman Wouk's melodramas The Winds of War and War and Remembrance were tolerable entertainment. The historical framework of World War II was well enough known that the author could focus on the adventures of his solid-oak characters without having to teach history. That's not true of The Hope (Little, Brown; 693 pages; $24.95), Wouk's earnest novel about Israel's first two decades, beginning with the fight for independence in 1948 and carrying through...
...Another doorstop-size novel from Herman Wouk...