Word: enigma
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This is a mystery about us, not about him. A man as voluble as Clinton, who talks himself down to his underwear--the most famous person in a culture of celebrity and psychoanalysis--cannot remain an enigma for four years...
...cockpit-voice recorder quickly yielded only a tantalizing enigma: what Francis called a "fraction-of-a-second sound" 111/2 minutes into the flight, followed by silence. This tiny glitch of noise reinforced the notion--privately held by many government officials almost from the beginning--that Flight 800 was brought down by a bomb or even a missile. During a Friday- afternoon news conference, Francis revealed that the NTSB was consulting with investigators of what proved to be bombings of an Air India jet in 1985 and of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland...
This anguished memoir by novelist Mary Gordon is a desperate search for her father, a self-created enigma who died when she was seven. Perhaps inevitably, the search fails. The father a seven-year-old knows--her hero, her first Prince Charming--does not really exist. But dying, he is frozen forever in a child's adoring perception. At 10, the author recalls, she began to write her father's biography with the words "My father is the greatest man I have ever known...
...scene in which the great man argues with his wife across the expanse of a long dinner table. Citizen Nixon, anyone? You might expect that Stone, our most vigorous and cinematically ambitious director, would be drawn to create a prismatic, Kane-like portrait of a potentate who was an enigma, not least to himself. But no. Stone is content to dramatize major episodes from the life. Some have voltage, but others are dry re-enactments inserted for the record. This gives much of the film an oddly pageantlike, perfunctory tone. It's a $43 million term paper...
...Bletchley because of instability, but is brought back again because his eerily acute mind is needed even if it is haunted and unraveling. Subplots involve a forlorn love interest and the burrowings of a suspected mole, but the real story, and a good one, is whether Jericho can track Enigma through the deep space of his own brain before he melts to ash. Great mathematical ability remains a snark that can't really be hunted in a novel, but the author provides what is possible, the illusion of understanding as an unearthly mind reaches for patterns in a mist...