Word: heart
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hochschild's carefully controlled pen never allows the data to dominate the story; he integrates the information into a fluid narrative style. This story is far from a series of dry laundry lists. Hochschild begins each chapter with a vivid character portrait that provides an accessible segue into the heart of the story...
Leopold and Stanley were certainly not the only villains in this story; even the infamous Mr. Kurtz of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness makes an appearance. Specifically, Hochschild has found no less than three men who could feasibly have served as models for the character of Kurtz. One of these men, Leon Rom, was station chief at Stanley Falls, on which Conrad's "Inner Station" may be based, and kept 21 heads as a decoration around his flower bed. But Hochschild makes an important distinction--he asserts that while Conrad's tale may have many levels of literary significance...
...have intended for the listener to sense a deep, realistic optimism at the core of Springsteen's famous hard-luck pessimism: instead, he sounds like a musical Danielle Steele, chronicling the middle-age discovery of true joy in a tainted world: "Happy/With you in my arms/Happy/With you in my heart." It is not that contemporary music requires intelligent lyrics to be successful, but if the lyrics go unaccompanied by powerful music, they might at least avoid offending the listener...
Enter Phil Luckett, bless his heart. In the now-infamous coin toss, Luckett succumbed to a moment of aural hallucination and misheard Jerome Bettis's call of tails, awarding Detroit possession...
...proceeded to chow down on my cranberry sauce and stuffing with a light heart, secure in the conviction that, with luck like this, those dastardly men in stripes might be able to carry me through the entire week...