Word: heros
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...narrative's first volume, Berlin Game, began with heavy irony, as Deighton's hero Bernard Samson, a British agent watching for trouble at the Wall, asked his friend Werner Volkmann, "How long have we been sitting here?" and Volkmann answered sourly, "Nearly a quarter of a century." Spy Line, set in the present, starts off with a joke that might have been heard over coffee at a Tory think tank: "Glasnost is trying to escape over the Wall, and getting shot with a silenced machine gun!" Its pivotal violence is a bloody shoot-out during an attempted escape along...
...late 1987 the name of Alan Bond was riding very high in America, and in Australia he was a hero. "Bondy," as his country called him, was the prime mover in the syndicate that funded the design, construction and testing of Australia II, the 12-meter sloop with the controversial winged keel that swept to victory over the U.S. defender off Newport in 1983, leaving, for the first time in yachting history, an empty plinth in the New York Yacht Club where the America's Cup used to stand...
Lech Walesa is welcomed in the U.S. as a hero and pleads to let "deeds follow words" in Congress. But diplomatic caution and crippling deficits could shut America out of the emerging European order. -- The House swaps a pay hike for an honorarium ban, but the Senate passes on the bucks. -- As the S & L scandal spreads, the spotlight turns on the federal regulator who let the looting continue. -- Tornadoes strike 14 states, devastating Huntsville, Ala., and a New York school...
...usual, King's prose is fast, simple and sloppy. He has young Beaumont in 1960 use the current slang "get off on," meaning enjoy, and lets an elderly English professor say he will "loan" the hero a car (old pedants say "lend"). The climax has the brutish Stark absurdly trying to write another novel to keep his ectoplasm from sloughing away in rivulets of goo. Characterization is perfunctory, with an odd exception: Beaumont's eight- month-old twin babies are vividly and charmingly described. For King fans this may be the sort of thing that sustains the myth that...
...stocky frame. He lacks conventional star magnetism: the athletic abandon, the flaming sexuality, the audacity of interpretation that risks derision to achieve greatness. Expect no swooning teenagers to queue at his stage door, no desperate fan to write him suicide notes. Anyway, he would reject that form of hero worship, for his personality radiates shopkeeper common sense. He is a model of Thatcherite initiative in a British arts scene of radical distemper...