Word: machina
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What little suspense remains in the two plots is bumped off by two separate and rather clumsy deus ex machina climaxes. And Gino and Jerry learn some nice lessons about friendship, loyalty and honor...
...William Kennedy. How his fourth novel came bouncing back from publishing houses 13 times, and how two of his earlier books, Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, seemed doomed to remain a dyad rather than parts of the trilogy their author had planned. Enter a deus ex machina in the person of Saul Bellow, a Nobel laureate, no less, who administered a scolding to those who had rebuffed Kennedy's manuscript and thereby inaugurated a streak of magic. When Ironweed finally appeared in 1983, it won a fistful of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, not to mention a sale...
...representative of students' interests. Being an Undergraduate Council representative is not just "a sort of recognition or honor" like any other activity; it involves responsibility to constituents and their interests. That responsibility can only be given or withdrawn by students, not by the University administration as deus ex machina...
...Reagan Doctrine holds that the U.S. should bypass nervous and sometimes unreliable foreign friends in order to harass and, if possible, overthrow Moscow's clients in the Third World. SDI, as originally conceived by Reagan in 1983, was a deus ex machina of global unilateralism: a made-in-the-U.S.A. system for effectively disarming the Soviet Union and any other foreign threat to the U.S. (including, in a number of scenarios, a nuclear-armed Gaddafi or other Islamic firebrand...
Despite the deus ex machina appearance of Isles, her testimony may have hurt the prosecution as much as helped it. Her sensational revelation about the phone call from Von Bulow in which he first disclosed his wife's coma cut both ways. Isles testified that Von Bulow told her that he and his wife had been having an argument about divorce that "had gone on late into the night. She had drunk a great deal of eggnog. Then, he said, 'I saw her take the Seconal.' And then he said that the next day, when she was unconscious, that...