Word: frontier
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...characters in Thomas Glynn's second novel (his first, Temporary Sanity, was published in 1976) live in the Building, a decaying apartment house somewhere in ungentrified Brooklyn. It is a timely setting for this unruly comic fantasy about the failure of social engineering. Condomania has yet to reach this frontier of violence and depravity, and the Building's activities are too strong for the local evening news. In the bloodstained lobby, the old joke that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged would not be funny...
...attitude toward disease has been tempered by modern medicine. Many of the ogres of the past, including small pox, polio, and tuberculosis, have been tamed or eliminated. With the advent of microsurgery, even chainsaws and lawnmowers have lost their element of danger. Death has been driven back to the frontier of old age, and so become distant and less real...
...battle brought back together two old rivals. Burr was a protege of Lorenzo's at Texas Air in the 1970s but left on bad terms. Though they still dislike each other, Burr and Lorenzo share certain traits, including an antipathy for organized labor. Wall Street analysts were dumbfounded that Frontier's unions found Burr any more palatable than Lorenzo. People, after all, is a non-union shop. Says one airline consultant: "Don Burr is as surprised as anyone else that Frontier struck a deal with People...
Questions remain about Frontier's future. The purchase agreement guarantees that no employees will be laid off for a minimum of five years, but People's management is known for its low-budget operations. It flies passengers for 5.17 cents a mile, about half the industry average. People will surely look for ways to cut overhead, and that could include labor costs...
Linking People's routes with Frontier's should make for a good mix. People flies mostly to East Coast cities, while Frontier's routes are concentrated in the West. In addition, Frontier's 21 landing gates at Denver's bustling Stapleton Airport are a valuable prize for People. Says Ruth Hennefeld, an investment manager at Merrill Lynch: "The deal is a bargain for People. The company bought into the Denver market for far less than it would have cost it to start from scratch." People's once lofty goal of becoming a national airline now seems remarkably down to earth...