Word: manful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Time was when what used to be called juvenile delinquents were offered a $ stark choice: join the service or go to jail. A dose of military discipline was supposed to make a man out of a boy and set him on the path to respectable citizenship. But the all-volunteer armed forces eliminated that option for what are now called youthful offenders. In a growing number of states, however, the purported benefits of paramilitary discipline are being showered on young criminals through programs known as "shock incarceration...
Gage relives his father's American Dream more passionately than his own. The author's exploits are subordinated to the old man's: his struggles to sustain his clan and make sure that his daughters find suitable (meaning Greek) husbands. Gatzoyiannis' death at age 90 provides a classic resolution. Surrounded by his children and grandchildren, he drifts off on old memories. It is a scene that evokes Chekhov and his observation that "any idiot can face a crisis. It is this day-to-day living that wears...
...Coto de Caza, 60 miles southeast of Los Angeles, a few dozen students are watching a most peculiar exhibition. At one end of a tennis court, a ball machine flings one ball after another across the net. Seated on a chair on the opposite side, a short, chubby man, racquet in hand, rises to meet each one, hitting it squarely with a looping forehand. Thwack. Thwack. The balls whiz back over the net, landing just inside the base line...
...elephants thundered amid the scrub thorn, acacia and baobob trees. Last year's aerial survey spotted only 5,363 live elephants in and around the park, and 2,421 carcasses. The survivors are skittish creatures, often clustered in fear and quick to flee at the scent of man...
William Cornelius Van Horne, painter, poker player, collector of Japanese porcelain, was probably the man most responsible for the most beautiful train ride in the western hemisphere. It was 1881 when he took over construction of the trans-Canadian railway, a project that consumed several fortunes, 4 1/2 years of agonizing labor and an untold number of lives. "Since we can't export the scenery," he once said, expressing a frontiersman's thirsty love of the land, "we'll have to import the tourists...