Word: life
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...preached. After serving time in a celebrated case involving the shooting of an Oakland policeman, he earned a doctorate from the University of California. But after J. Edgar Hoover's FBI targeted the group, many of his fellow Panther leaders were killed, jailed or driven underground, and Newton's life returned to its meaner roots. Charges of murder and assault led to conviction for possessing a gun. There followed a string of drug offenses, drunk driving and embezzling $15,000 from a Panther-operated school...
...favorite old movies. So on one swerving narrative track, Woodward (J.T. Walsh), like the reporter in Citizen Kane, gets dirty dish from the star's friends. On the other, an angel of death (Ray Sharkey), a hipster version of the guardian angel in It's a Wonderful Life, escorts the dead Belushi (Michael Chiklis) to the scenes of his ebullient crimes...
Love him or hate him, John Silber is impossible to ignore. The spotlight of controversy seems to seek him out. Earlier this year he was in the headlines with an audacious fund-raising plan to take out life-insurance policies on students and alumni. In May, Silber scored a double coup over neighboring + Harvard by playing host to Presidents George Bush and Francois Mitterrand of France at B.U.'s graduation exercises. Next month Silber's precedent-setting experiment at running the troubled public schools of Chelsea, Mass., gets under way in the glare of national publicity. And in a forthcoming...
Silber's outspokenness is not limited to educational matters. Whether writing or speaking, he characteristically offers opinions on everything from Nicaragua (pro-contra) and Gorbachev (don't trust him) to abortion (pro-life) and Jesse Jackson (full of "mindless, rhyming pieces of nonsense on which he has built a career"). One of his central philosophical tenets is the necessity of accepting hardship and disappointment. "I'm sorry I didn't put 'death' into the index," he said in an interview. "I really believe that confrontation with death and with reality is necessary to moral education...
...marked much of Silber's career. "Everything is combat to him," says one B.U. professor. Born in San Antonio, Silber grew up in the hardscrabble Depression years. His mother helped support the family as a schoolteacher while his father, a German architect, tried to make ends meet. Silber started life with a deformed right arm, and his efforts to overcome that handicap probably contributed to his combativeness. After graduate forays into law and religion -- he once studied for the ministry -- Silber received a doctorate in philosophy from Yale and went on to teach at the University of Texas in Austin...