Word: grand
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...party has been hemorrhaging members for well over two decades, and this summer it lost its ranking as Germany's biggest mass-membership party, or Volkspartei, to Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), with which it governs in an uneasy grand coalition. The SPD continues to lose supporters to the upstart Die Linke (The Left), a party made up of former east German communists and disaffected leftists from the west of the country. According to the latest polls, just 21% of Germans now say they would vote for the party of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt if an election were...
...which he was widely criticized for failing to unite the party's warring camps and for aggressively moving the party towards the left. Beck was seen as close to the party's working class base but unable to hold his own in the rough and tumble of Berlin grand coalition politics. The job may also have been "too much for him intellectually," speculates Langguth. The final blow may have been his decision earlier this year to entertain the prospect of forming a government in the state of Hesse with the minority backing of Die Linke, a party that many...
...easy to write fiction inspired by current events, especially if those events involve politics. The stage is too grand, the spotlight too bright. Our public life already is ridiculously flagrant, far too obvious and overwrought for good fiction. And so, all too often, political novels descend from satire into cheap farce. Such books can be entertaining and sometimes cathartic but usually not very nourishing. American Wife is something else entirely--the opposite of a political satire, in fact--with a languorous pace and a fierce literary integrity: Alice and Charlie are complete creations, unique in their humanity--Alice especially...
...Bush as President. One hundred years from now, historians will scratch their heads and ask themselves the same question that plagues Alice Blackwell: How did this amiable but feckless man ever get to be President? Curtis Sittenfeld has provided a plausible secret history of an American embarrassment--and a grand entertainment. American Wife heralds the end of the Age of Bush, which cannot come too soon...
...brunt of the storm passed directly over the coast's best-preserved barrier island, Grand Isle, which sapped its power; Gustav also seems to have passed over another speed bump in the form of a rare swath of healthy marshes. "It's really incredible; a slight variation of the track either way could have meant six more feet of storm surge," says Louisiana State University coastal scientist Robert Twilley, who studied Gustav's track. "I hope nobody gets a false sense of security." The barrier islands that once protected New Orleans have eroded, and most of the city's nearby...