Word: gentleman
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Three of Author Walker Percy's five previous novels bear titles with implications of apocalypse: The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins and The Second Coming. The other two, The Moviegoer and Lancelot, are exceptions in name only. For all of Percy's fiction revolves around a central question: can humane, civilized life survive this murderous, mechanized century? Details change from book to book, but a number of constants recur. The hero is typically a Southerner and a loner, a weirdo in the eyes of friends and relatives, whose despair at the decline of civilization has lured him into alcoholism...
...print media have been led by the AIDS epidemic to ease their codes. Among those reversing their policies: Gentleman's Quarterly, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time Inc.-owned magazines, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report and Vogue...
...gentleman spy was also native to the U.S. Founded in 1917, a clique known as the Room used the cover of international travel and scientific expeditions to gather information that it passed on to Washington and London. The Room's membership list read like the Social Register: Vincent Astor, Kermit Roosevelt, David Bruce (Andrew Mellon's son-in-law), Nelson Doubleday and a gilt edging of Wall Streeters and lawyers...
Before the Diller-Eisner team left, it had already moved Paramount neck- and-neck with Warner for Hollywood's No. 1 studio slot with such hits as Flashdance, An Officer and a Gentleman and Raiders of the Lost Ark. In Diller's final year, Paramount's profits hit what was then an all-time peak of $109 million on revenues of $986.6 million. The duo left behind one monster hit, Beverly Hills Cop, which subsequently brought in $235 million. But the Paramount stable also included such nags as King David ($5.1 million) and Explorers ($9.9 million). Paramount's market share...
...greatest separation of them all: the parents from their wallets. More interested in the here-and-now bottom line than in fairy tales or the mythic wellsprings behind children's play, the marketers have long since phased out the elves in Santa's workshop (and kicked the old gentleman upstairs to his present role as the Colonel Sanders of the Yuletide franchise). Big business, after all, is not kid stuff; the other way round is more like it. In the U.S. last Christmas, according to the ledgers of the Wall Street Journal, "the average household bought 30 gifts and spent...