Word: harps
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...could either harp on it, or see how much faster we can get," Bernstein explained. His team is choosing to do the latter, and plans to make the best of their reunion race with their new foes...
...susceptibility to "pernicious" influences. Among those who (in his view) have hitched themselves to "this strange, huge, conspicuous balloon, which was soaring to the heights without engine or petrol" -- me -- Solzhenitsyn's sharpest, if covert, thrusts are aimed at my wife. Her "deleterious" influence, he suggests, led me to harp on emigration by Jewish refuseniks -- people "who did not feel that Russia was their own country...
...HARP by John Gregory Dunne (Simon & Schuster; $18.95). Novelist Dunne (True Confessions) fesses up that his own barbed style and snappish instincts have roots in an immigrant Irish heritage in which he learned that writing well is the best revenge...
...wasn't that Dunne lacked status. His grandfather was a grocer who built himself up to community pillar, and his father was a respected surgeon. Dunne went to Princeton University and perfected talking through his nose, the better to honk down the lower orders. But once a Harp always a Harp, a lesson driven home by another old institution, the U.S. Army. German whores, barracks mates with tattoos, the general cynicism toward military routine, all validated his own outlook. Truth be told -- and Dunne tells it -- he is fascinated by life on the wild side...
This brush with mortality in middle age provides Harp with a certain amount of momentum. The deaths of family members lead to a search for his ancestral roots in Ireland and an application for an Irish passport. His motives are mixed: "The fact is I wanted an Irish passport for the simple reason that I was eligible for one. Trying to get one would both add structure to my journey and force me into that examination of my Irish background that I had always so rigorously rejected...