Word: leon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wasted no time in denying that the cruise-liner hijackers had anything to do with the P.L.O. Arafat's attempt to portray himself as a peacemaker reached a peak when the Achille Lauro hijackers surrendered, seemingly as a result of pressure from P.L.O. mediators. Later, when the reports of Leon Klinghoffer's murder were confirmed, Arafat had promised that if the gunmen were turned over to the P.L.O., the organization would bring them to justice...
Next morning, when 666 passengers left the ship for a day of sight-seeing and shopping in Cairo, Marilyn and her husband Leon, 69, stayed aboard. A retired appliance manufacturer, Leon had been confined to a wheelchair after suffering two strokes during the past three years. Another member of the group, Mildred Hodes, of Springfield, N.J., had planned to join her husband Frank on the Cairo trip, but at the last moment she changed her mind. That decision very nearly cost Mildred Hodes her life...
...exactly what point these sadistic threats became reality is not known. But in a now familiar ritual of terrorism, the hijackers had decided to underscore their seriousness by taking a sacrifice. First they separated Leon Klinghoffer from his wife. "No," said one gunman to the wheelchair-bound passenger. "You stay. She goes." Marilyn Klinghoffer never saw her husband again. For the next 24 hours she and her friends were consumed by anxiety. When the hijacking was finally over, they looked all through the ship for him, though they expected the worst. Some passengers had noted that the trousers and shoes...
Galapagos puts Vonnegut one more safe step beyond the complexities of good and evil. The narrator is an amiable phantom named Leon Trout, son of Kilgore Trout of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Breakfast of Champions. Leon speaks to us from the future, 1 million years after humanity is supposed to have $ extinguished itself. Among the survivors are a handful of tourists and Ecuadorian Indians on Santa Rosalia, an island in the Galapagos. It was there, in 1835, that Charles Darwin observed the variety of species that inspired his theories of natural selection. But according to Vonnegut, nature goofed...
...told. Vonnegut's retrograde evolution is a cute idea but a literary dead end. Leon allows only a misty glimpse of the sweet by-and-by. The future is not dramatized because the elements of drama no longer exist. Instead, the narrator tells us about 1986, the year humanity took its first step down the evolutionary ladder. The tale is a burlesque that mixes natural history, sitcom humor and the Old Testament. For the Flood there is conflict, economic disaster and pollution; the part of Noah's Ark is played by the Bahia de Darwin, a cruise ship that shuttles...