Word: hubbub
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hubbub, with its attendant free publicity, increases the audience for The Satanic Verses, so much the better. The book is both an Arabian Nights narrative enchantment and a vast rumination on history, on the clash of cultures and individuals, and on the beliefs that people cherish for comfort and salvation. Author Salman Rushdie, 41, who was born in Bombay and educated at Cambridge, shows every sign of disproving Kipling's bromide about East, West and the twain never meeting. They have met, all right, in his experience and imagination, with results that are alternately comic, poignant and explosive...
What prevents The January Man from turning into a downscale Dangerous Liaisons is the movie's refusal to let the characters acknowledge this edgy subtext. Shanley instead provides a funny, melodramatic hubbub to distract our attention. His busy plotting may require a suspension of incredulity, but he is well served by good actors; by a director, Pat O'Connor, with a taste for the acrid flavors of big-city life; and by his own delight in human eccentricity...
...some, low prices are only part of the attraction. Says Luanne Culbert, a New Jersey chiropractor's wife who gave up her job as a stockbroker to raise her daughter Erin, 2: "It's a great day in the fresh air without the hubbub of the mall. I look for things that aren't in the department stores...
...right. Readers who do not understand what the hubbub is about will leave this book little the wiser. Brodkey is obviously talented, but his skills are quirky and obsessive, perhaps more mesmerizing to him than to casual spectators. There is Innocence, for example, which contains what is probably the longest description of oral sex in the history of literature. (This story decidedly did not appear in The New Yorker.) For page after page a Harvard undergraduate named Wiley tries to bring his stubbornly unresponsive girlfriend to orgasm: "The whitish bubbling, the splash of her discontinuous physical response: those waves...
Lost in the hubbub was the fact that the East Germans had also entered the final round of the team competition at a disadvantage. One of their team members, Martina Jentsch, had been forced by injury to withdraw, leaving the East Germans with just five gymnasts and without the opportunity to drop the lowest of six scores. Still, for the East Germans, the bronze medal will always be tarnished. And, ironically, while the U.S. team would have been quickly forgotten had it won the bronze, the furor ensures that the 1988 U.S. gymnastics team, led by Brandy Johnson and Mills...