Word: flooded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years ago, the lawmakers authorized the Treasury to mint 2 million commemorative gold coins honoring the Los Angeles Olympics, the first such special issue since 1932. Demand, however, was slack, possibly because collectors thought that additional Olympic coins might be issued every four years. Determined not to flood the market again, Congress this time ordered Treasury officials to mint only 500,000 of the gold coins for the Liberty series. But collectors, realizing that Miss Liberty's centennial is unique, drove up the price of the once-in-a-lifetime souvenirs...
Unlike most photographers, she was as famous as her pictures. The images she captured are memorable enough on their own: a line of flood victims in Kentucky stretched in front of a billboard braying prosperity; the German bombardment of the Kremlin by night during World War II; Mohandas Gandhi reading newspaper clippings near a spinning wheel, the primitive tool he used to forge a subcontinent's independence. Millions of people saw these photographs and others equally striking in LIFE; the big news to many was that they had been taken by a woman...
Thus John Flood, her first husband, appears in the narrative in three incarnations. He is the young doctor pursuing a brilliant future while his equally young wife sells her first book and discovers his infidelity with a night nurse. He is then the aggrieved ex-husband, complaining that Margaret's popular second novel, a "revenge tragedy" about their broken marriage, has damaged his reputation. And he is also the man, now a respected heart surgeon and administrator in Baltimore, to whom Margaret runs with a plea for a second opinion and chance: "Give me borrowed time, six months...
Margaret's revised version of her life introduces characters who were once secondary in her fiction but who assume a new importance. Dr. Flood, remarried and remorseful that in his career he "has hoed a narrow row," assigns Margaret's case to a talented younger colleague. An operation seems in order. Whether it succeeds or not, the patient wants to explain to her only child, Bayard, 16, the son of her second marriage, why his parents broke up and why his once aristocratic father, Pinkham Strong, has become the alcoholic custodian of a secondhand-clothes shop in lower Manhattan...
That final request applies not just to Bayard but to everyone who enters the dense, diffracted world of Expensive Habits. What Margaret Flood calls "the unflattering double vision of time" renders nearly everything that passes under her scrutiny as fused contradictions. With the best will in the world, people fail each other. Careful planning gives way to absurd accidents. There is a shocking death in this book, but the circumstances that lead up to it seem as fanciful and inevitable as the consequences that follow...