Word: john
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...first great flowering of his career, in the 1950s and '60s, John Cheever was, to all appearances, the crown prince of normality. The wife and three children, the faithful retrievers, the rambling old house in Ossining, N.Y. - in all its outward signs, his life was commensurate with his role as the man who was, with John Updike, the esteemed chronicler of the postwar suburbs. But if you came to his fiction expecting sunlit scenes of American life, you were mistaken. Though his work was shot through with the beauty and abundance of the world, of suburban "nights where kings...
...other people's contentment and vitality." But we get a much fuller and more reliable picture in Blake Bailey's fine new biography Cheever: A Life (Knopf; 770 pages), a portrait of the man drawn judiciously but compellingly and in harrowing detail. (Read TIME's 1964 cover story about John Cheever...
Cheever grew up in the Greater Boston shore town of Quincy. His father was a traveling shoe salesman successful enough for a while to keep his family in middling Yankee splendor - a big house, good schools for John and his older brother Fred. But by the mid-1920s, as Cheever reached his teens, the shoe business was tanking, and his father was increasingly drunk and adrift. To make ends meet, his mother opened a gift shop that Cheever would describe as "an abysmal humiliation," at least for him. The big house would be lost anyway; his mother would shed...
...security teams and ratchets up intelligence resources to track Mexico's increasingly chaotic mix of drug organizations, at least three of which are fighting for control of Juárez. "Adding resources to fight the weapons flow, the bulk currency shipments, and strengthen intelligence are all welcome moves," says John Bailey, an expert on Mexican drug-trafficking at Georgetown University. "The question is whether the Americans are now putting some kind of long-term policy in place," which was often missing from previous Administrations...
...never hurt anyone - before, during or after the war. He is a good person, as his family, grandchildren, friends and neighbors have always maintained." - John Demjanjuk Jr., son of the accused, after Germany filed charges against his father. (AP, March...