Word: heroism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...their icy cabin. And Hanks provides the anchor. His Lovell--as strong, faithful and emotionally straightforward as Forrest Gump--carries the story like a precious oxygen backpack. His resourcefulness gives Lovell strength; his gift for conveying worry gives the film its humanity and a purchase on ordinary-Joe heroism...
...saved him are genuine heroes. This vest-pocket Gulf War was in every respect the exact opposite of the conflict that gave rise to it. And for one chimerical moment, the rescue pierced the frustrations of the Bosnian conflict-where clear-cut successes, decisive actions, brilliant displays of military heroism have all been in short supply. In Bosnia, on most days, there is only murk, brutality and death...
...author's line of sight has shifted, maybe broadened. A theme that recurs is of white medics in Africa. Heroism here consists of crumbling into alcoholism, drugs and depression as slowly as possible, and with as much grace. Occasional joyousness is real but fragmented. The narrator of the title story is a washed-up doc, fired from his African aid mission and back home in the U.S., who is taking his depressed and institutionalized sister for an outing. They kid around about death and heaven, then veer into cheerfulness: "I'm thinking that I'm gonna be all right...
...Braveheart is its unhappy ending. After all that time, you want and expect evil to be confounded. What you get instead is the hero being tortured to death. The suspense is this: Will he crack, cry out in pain, thus robbing posterity of an inspiring example of masochism-sorry, heroism? Come on. That's Mel Gibson the wild horses are trying to pull apart. Of course he's going to die stoically. Everybody knows that a non-blubbering clause is standard in all movie stars' contracts. Too bad there isn't one banning self-indulgence when they direct...
...Source of Light. As is usually said about concluding volumes of trilogies, the new novel can stand alone, which in this case means not only that it makes good dramatic sense by itself, but also that it is not necessary to know its writing was an act of heroism. For the past few years, as he recounted in A Whole New Life, Price has been almost totally incapacitated by spinal cancer. What little can be detected of this in the novel is transmuted, without self-pity, as a minor theme, the son's helplessness and fretful dreaming in his last...