Word: dreaded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more than enough to raise dread echoes of the word so often tossed around in hyperbole, so rarely in earnest: Watergate. The parallels might be exaggerated -- this scandal, after all, was announced by the Administration rather than forced out by the courts -- but they were there just the same. Once again there were rumors of documents being destroyed (by North and Poindexter). Once again the White House was resisting demands for a special prosecutor (now called independent counsel) put forth by Congressmen who did not trust the Administration to investigate itself. Once again congressional hearings were getting ready to launch...
...fear is not of incapacitation but of that dreadful "W" word: Watergate. However, it comes to the same thing. All over Washington last week there was a sickening feeling of "here we go again," a dread of another orgy of public self-flagellation, of deepening public suspicion that might undermine all governmental authority. Nor was that foreboding confined to the Administration's allies. Journalists could sense among those Congressmen most determined to investigate the Iran-contra scandal an unspoken fear of where the investigations might lead, a kind of silent prayer that it would not once again be straight into...
...ostensibly glamorous worlds, publishing and theater. The author once worked as an editor at Viking Press, and she writes of the industry with affectionate exasperation. There is a wonderful Mad Hatter editorial meeting, propelled by reasoning of the most tangential sort. There are the elusive editors who dread authors as "walking vessels of petty grievance and conceit." An especially funny cameo is Allan Schieffman, the macho editor who boasts to Frances that "Norman Mailer had punched him in the stomach, an affectionate punch, and a tribute to his washboard midriff . . . Saul Bellow had bipped him on the arm to test...
...question matters because Dubus insists that actions, however dumb or careless, create moral consequences. Someone is to blame for wife and child battering, for drug abuse, for racial hatred, for crime, for the sense of dread that is "loose in the land." In Land Where My Fathers Died, a lawyer in a small Massachusetts town takes on the case of a man accused of murdering a local physician. Archimedes Nionakis knows that his client is innocent. He also realizes that in trying to find the real killer, "I was going to confront nothing as pure and recognizable as evil...
...Rice Krispies cookies and tremulous advice ("Peggy, you know what a penis is -- stay away from it!"). She enjoys vamping Michael the beatnik, sharing a joint in a moonlit meadow as he howls out his Ginsbergian verse ("Sucking pods of bitterness/ In the madhouse of Doctor Dread/ Razor shreds of rat puke fall on my bare arms"). She is even touched by Charlie's perplexed devotion, his doomed itch for pop stardom, his '50s suaveness that plays like '80s nerdity. Youth may be wasted on the young, but Peggy Sue savors it the second time around...