Word: good
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...GOOD TIMES by Russell Baker; Morrow; 351 pages...
...mind, wakes me some mornings before daybreak. 'If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a quitter.' I have heard her say that all my life. Now, lying in bed, coming awake in the dark, I feel the fury of her energy fighting the good-for-nothing idler within me who wants to go back to sleep instead of tackling the brave...
...begins The Good Times, the second installment of Baker's memoirs. The first, Growing Up (1982), won a Pulitzer Prize, stayed on best-seller lists for nearly a year, and remains a masterstroke of unpretentious autobiography. It too got its direction from the character of Lucy Elizabeth Baker, the needy young widow whose platitudes about hard work and gumption herded Russell and his sister through the Great Depression...
...good times Baker refers to in his title are from 1947, the year he joined the Baltimore Sun, until 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated. Yet to come were full-scale war in Viet Nam, civil unrest, Watergate, gas lines, stagflation, and the proliferation of junk food and junk politics. Unsurprisingly these not-so-good times provided Baker with his best material as a columnist. But as a memoirist he seems to be finding that Russell Baker is a tough act to follow, especially if you are Russell Baker...
...planet in the solar system. She appears once a month on late- night British TV to discuss the universe, and has been dubbed "Starlady Sandra" by the tabloids. But recognition does not satisfy her, and neither does her husband Matthew, an ambitious lawyer and tepid bedmate ("What's good enough for missionaries is good enough for me"). So Sandra does what any woman in her fix would do: she runs off with Jack Stubbs, the trumpet player in a ragtag band called the Citronella Jumpers...