Word: modern
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...novelist Cynthia Ozick, in an article that holds up the diary as a sacred text and condemns any tamperers. The passions the book ignites suggest that everyone owns Anne Frank, that she has risen above the Holocaust, Judaism, girlhood and even goodness and become a totemic figure of the modern world--the moral individual mind beset by the machinery of destruction, insisting on the right to live and question and hope for the future of human beings...
...particular as was the Nazi method of answering "the Jewish question," it also, if incidentally, presented a form of the archetypal modern predicament. When the Nazis invaded Holland, the Frank family, like all Jewish residents, became victims of a systematically constricting universe. First came laws that forbade Jews to enter into business contracts. Then books by Jews were burned. Then there were the so-called Aryan laws, affecting intermarriage. Then Jews were barred from parks, beaches, movies, libraries. By 1942 they had to wear yellow stars stitched to their outer garments. Then phone service was denied them, then bicycles. Trapped...
...sense, the quasi-religious mystique of royalty came full circle with Diana. Monarchy used to be based on divine right. But just as monarchy used religious trappings to justify its rule, modern show-biz celebrity has a way of slipping into a form of popular religion. It is surely not for nothing that an idolized pop singer of recent times so successfully exploited her given name, Madonna. One of the most traditional roles of religious idols is a sacrificial one; we project our sins onto them, and they bear our crosses in public...
...Bowl games, the unfathomable record of touchdown passes in 47 straight games (people come closer to Joe DiMaggio's streak than to this one: next best after Unitas is Dan Marino, with 30). But Unitas' influence--vast and beyond challenge--is this: he was the first modern quarterback in a sport that the quarterbacks have owned ever since...
Lindbergh wanted his wife to be an independent, modern woman--and yet he wanted to remain the focus and center of her life. She stuck with him through heartbreak and controversy, including the murder of their son and Charles' infatuation with Hitler's Germany. But she was capable of quiet rebellion. She made Charles jealous by becoming smitten with French aviator and writer Antoine de St.-Exupery in 1939. In the '50s, as the marriage stagnated, she allowed a friendship with her doctor to blossom into a short-lived affair. But though Anne believed she and Charles were "badly mated...