Word: gripping
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...environment is essential to McGuane, for both his peace of mind and his work. "I feel strongly that writers need to be some place," he says. "The real thing, the real job of artists of any kind is to somehow seize the life you're having in an unrelinquishing grip." McGuane is sure to continue doing exactly that. But, just in case, he keeps his epitaph handy. His eyes gleam with mischief as he repeats it: "No stone unturned -- except this...
...great variety of symptoms that confronted the Communists of East Germany and Czechoslovakia last week were not morbid, but they did carry the risk of metastasizing into something dangerous. As exhilarating as the rapid pace of change may be, the tight grip of party rule that seemed unshakable just weeks ago has loosened to the point of presenting both countries with the prospect of events slipping out of control. Though the revolution in East Berlin continues to outrace changes in Prague, the dynamics of tumult are much the same in both countries. Besieged party leaders grant one desperate concession ) after...
What will work? Only policies the West takes for granted but that could weaken Gorbachev's grip on power -- lifting price controls, encouraging more entrepreneurism, decentralizing economic decision making...
...open the way for distribution of Havel's essays and plays, which are often likened to the absurdist works of Ionesco and Beckett. What Czechoslovaks will discover is a painstaking attention to the elaborate web of falsification that for so long enabled a despised leadership to maintain its grip. Havel's work depicts the idiocy of entrenched bureaucracies and the power of language to twist and distort ideas. It also highlights the unwitting complicity of ordinary citizens in the maintenance of totalitarian regimes. "Everyone is in fact involved and enslaved," Havel once told TIME. "Each person is capable...
Despite Bush's sweeping rhetoric, his closest advisers predict that he will stick to the cautious script he has followed since Hungary, Poland, East Germany and most recently Czechoslovakia began loosening the grip of Communist repression. But the President was dropping hints that if the chemistry is right, then maybe -- just maybe -- the meeting in Malta could go beyond the modest get-acquainted session he originally envisioned. He dangled that possibility in his televised speech. While stressing that the meeting "will not be a time for detailed arms-control negotiations" and that "there will be no surprises sprung...