Word: harrison
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...Harrison travels to Rumania a few days after the 1989 revolution to seek out Comenici's family and past. She stunningly juxtaposes the vitality of the awakening nation with hardened gymnast's artificiality...
...this complex piece is not simply judgemental; it is mournful. Harrison never loses sight of the twisted nature of the government under which Comeneci grew up and the unnatural strains placed on the teenage girl who was also a world-class athlete. The essay is a terrifying portrait of a weak person in bad circumstances, a "casualty...
...Harrison displays the same complexity and sensitivity when she likes her subject. She wears her enchantment on her sleeve in her engaging profile of Mario Cuomo, "the most formidable and glamorous man I have ever...
...also larger than life. "His gestures are large and his deepest large dark baggy eyes are dramatically hooded, and the defining lines of his fleshy fifty-nine-year-old face are so deeply etched one feels one could read him like Braille...He thinks he looks like a frog." Harrison makes her admiration palpable...
...equally captivating in her more blatantly personal essays. "Women and Blacks and Bensonhurst" meditates on Harrison's hometown, the New York suburb where Yusuf Hawkins, a Black sixteen-year-old, was shot to death in 1989 by a group of Italian-Americans who thought he was dating a local girl. Resisting what she calls the "mandolin and macaroni" depiction of Italian-American uraban life, she recalls grimly the casual racism and violence of life in Bensonhurst, and the stifling nature of community life there. "What you don't want known in Bensonhurst you don't do," she writes...