Word: hamilton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After two months at Hamilton College in 1945, he quit to enlist in the Marines. Memorizing the eye chart in advance, he almost passed the eye test before his glass eye was noticed ("One eye didn't move, and they thought something was fishy"). The glass eye also kept him off the decks and out of the engine room in the merchant marine, so he signed on as a cook...
...year later, he went back to Hamilton, then to Manhattan's New School for Social Research, where he earned a B.A. in business administration. He and a girl friend took off for five months of thumb-tripping and odd-jobbing in Yugoslavia. He returned to get a master's degree in public administration from Syracuse University and decided to become a spy. He went to Washington to offer himself to the CIA, but it was 1953, the McCarthy era, and after one look at his record, "the guy at the CIA laughed and told...
...house at Sandhurst, the British West Point-where Mark will take up duties as a teacher of military skills in March-for the unprincely sum of $20 a week. "She's getting [the allowance] for riding and falling off a horse and nothing else," sneered Labor M.P. William Hamilton, a longtime royalty baiter...
...very appealing. To turn a villian into a hero of today's world-historical audience, the modern technique involves showing the basic humanity of the culprit while simultaneously debunking the old heroes. So Vidal's Burr endlessly derides Jefferson for his hypocritical dishonesty, Washington for his sanctimonious self-righteousness, Hamilton for his arrogant aristocratic-leanings. And this Burr is a man of his times--intoxicated by the Napoleonic vision of his era, but hardly to be faulted for being a product of his period...
...this book does not make it, but since Burr is a historical novel rather than a learned defense of an ex-vice president of the United States, its failure in interpreting the period is incidental. Burr remains what he was--Revolutionary War hero, New York lawyer, vice president, Alexander Hamilton's murderer, Western adventurer, exile, and New York lawyer again. Burr concentrates on the public events in Burr's life--making numerous and obligatory bows toward his home life, but never really exploring it with the exception of one grotesque incident late in Burr's life, his brief marriage...