Word: heroics
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...story has helped protect him from his own faults, his ethical lapses, his ugly outbursts, the abandoned first marriage, because he admits to failures that sound more heroic than most people's successes, and it is hard to judge someone who has made choices most civilians can't even imagine. It's not just that he survived being hung by ropes from two broken arms and beaten senseless; it's that when his captors learned of his famous father and offered to let him go home, he refused unless they let the rest of the prisoners go as well. Such...
...punishment for the historical wrongs committed by her race. To Lurie, this is at first incomprehensible. He still needs to have recourse to avenues of escape from realityphysical pleasure; a fantasy about writing an opera on the poet Byron and his mistress Teresa; a longing for a former, more heroic self; anger and outrage. But the novel traces the process whereby he is able to find his own way of expiating his abuse of power and his guilt at being useless to his daughter and thereby is able to confront reality...
That he only partly succeeded is one of the many charms of Wild Fruits (Norton; 409 pages; $29.95), which finally sees print thanks to the heroic editing efforts of Thoreau scholar Bradley Dean. Thoreau left the Wild Fruits manuscript neatly stacked and wrapped at the time of his death, but much jumbling and shuffling occurred as the papers passed from owner to owner. That confusion, plus Thoreau's notoriously hen-scratched handwriting, kept Wild Fruits a closed book until now. Readers will find that its preserved contents have aged...
...themselves such that with under a minute remaining, Harvard needed two touchdowns plus two two-point conversions to tie the game. No room for error whatsoever. There would be no possibility of a win, only a tie. Circumstance so rarely affords any team or individual to play out a heroic miracle such as that; when and while it happens, it almost seems preordained that the miracle outcome might manifest...
...astonishing character study that dominates the first half begins to unravel when the film, inexplicably, changes its focus from Wigand to Bergman. Just as Wigand is entering his darkest period, becoming psychologically unhinged, the film cuts away to Bergman and his struggles with the brass at CBS. The heroic, moral air that builds up around Bergman in the last third almost suffocates the intricate and brilliant tale before it and threatens to turn the film into a full-blown, us-vs.-them morality tale...