Word: harvey
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...claims in letters that he murdered 37 people in the '60s and '70s, was never caught. Sara Jane Moore tried to shoot Gerald Ford in San Francisco. The Symbionese Liberation Army was nurtured there. Dan White, the baked-potato vendor and former city supervisor, shot and killed Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in city hall. Every couple of weeks or so, someone leaps off the Golden Gate Bridge into the deep blue sea. The city suicide rate is half again as high as the nation...
Muriel Spark's 17th novel is informed with that perception. Her central character is a pained, Job-like figure regarded in a comic light, as if, between losses, he is playing God's fool. It is a difficult role. Harvey Gotham is a wealthy scholar-dilettante who retires to rural France in his mid-30s. There he occupies himself with a monograph on the riddle of universal suffering: If the Lord is beneficent, why does his earth contain so much misery? On the bestseller list that conundrum is called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Here...
...Harvey endlessly wrestles with that problem, but he has retreated so far from the world that he no longer understands the sources and sorrows of the human condition. He is soon reminded. One morning the police arrive with unsettling news. Harvey originally abandoned his wife Effie because she was not merely unfaithful (he now has custody of her child Clara by a lover); she was also a kleptomaniac specializing in chocolate. Since then her crimes have escalated. She is now a member of the Front for the Liberation of Europe, a violent terrorist gang. The ingenuous Harvey is abruptly surrounded...
Spark once wrote, half whimsically, that in the Book of Job "there are points of characterization and philosophy on which I think I could improve." Her alterations chiefly consist of attempts at clever explication. Job's suffering "became a habit," theorizes Harvey. "He not only argued the problem of suffering, he suffered the problem of argument. And that is incurable." As for the comforters, at least they "kept him company. And they took turns as analyst. Job was like the patient on the couch." But, Harvey concludes, the Book of Job teaches us "the futility of friendship in times...
...author of the report, M. Harvey Brenner of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, linked the sharp rise in unem ployment during the 1973-74 recession to a subsequent 2.8% rise hi deaths from heart attacks. Brenner found that a 3% decline in per capita income during the recession later caused 46,000 deaths from heart disease. Indeed, increased business failures were responsible for even more heart-disease fatalities - 95,680, to be exact...