Word: mirror
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Saddam once told a biographer he didn't care what anybody said of him today; he was more interested in what people would think of him in 500 years. Like so many tyrants, he was obsessed with his place in history. When he looked in the mirror he saw a reflection of great men of the ages: Nebuchadnezzar, Hammurabi, Saladin. Even the villains to whom his enemies compared him were historic--Hulegu, Hitler, Stalin...
...this era of rampant and unbridled narcissism, you have made the perfect choice. Thanks for the mirror. I just can't take my eyes off me, me, me. BRIAN O'NEIL Alameda, Calif...
...Aburiria queue for weeks to sign up for jobs that don't exist, while the poor lie dying in the streets. But their bloated, inept Ruler is more concerned with building a tower to heaven. Hopeless, the people turn to a wizard who cures their emotional ills using a mirror and advice so good it seems like magic. For the fictional Aburiria, think Africa. In Wizard of the Crow, Kenyan author Ngugi draws a folkloric tale out of the continent crippled by inequality, corruption and aids. But he sees the funny side, too. Wizard of the Crow is an epic...
...book is magnificent for its graceful, waltzing prose, its palimpsestic plot, and its egotistic but endearingly pathetic characters. And for affluent Ivy-League sophisticates, Messud’s novel can be a masochistic joy, holding the mirror up to our sometimes vain, vapid, inchoately ambitious selves...
Consider the boy, at 13 or 18, through the two-way mirror at a police station - oh, he knows you're watching - and see a creature of preternatural poise. He already has the disquieting gift of lowering the temperature of any room he enters. He is armed, by birth and training, with courtly courtesy; it would be called charm, if he were human. These impeccable manners do their best to conceal two of the lad's salient traits: his contempt for people and his almost artistic curiosity in how he might hurt them...