Word: odd
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even after four years, it comes back in a sweep. All it takes is one glimpse of a hockey shirt with U.S.A. planted on the front, and suddenly the scene re-erupts in the mind: sticks waved like flags, teammates hugging, a crowd in sweet tears. Odd for the summertime nation that a Winter Olympics provided such a memorable moment in sports, so memorable that half of us still swear that we beat the Russians, not the Finns, in the finals. But winter plays tricks with the senses. If we didn't know better, it would appear that 1 those...
...personal as well as international relations, wartime France created odd alliances and fierce resistance. Lena (Isabelle Huppert), a Belgian Jew, emerged from an internment camp with her sad-sack husband Michel (Guy Marchand) and a handmade marital straitjacket. Madeleine (Miou Miou) saw her glamorous first husband die from enemy gunfire in the town square, then fell into a pleasureless marriage with a slimy hustler named Costa (Jean-Pierre Bacri). By 1952, when most of Entre Nous takes place, each woman is eager to escape the emotional claustrophobia of cooking the meals, chaperoning the children, counterfeiting passion as Monsieur Wrong rolls...
...Oakland Raiders from 1963 through 1965, when the upstart American Football League appointed him its commissioner. Once he began romancing the N.F.L.'s star quarterbacks, the Establishment came around to the wisdom of merger. Whether or not he was more capable than Pete Rozelle, Davis became the odd commissioner out, and a man does not go from czar back to coach. Al took his place in the owner's box, but the game plans continue to be smudged with his fingerprints. Now and then, he also enjoys booting Rozelle around courtrooms...
...pine floors, and a shaft of the stuff glinted off the Wolfs' decanter collection and their cut-glass saltcellar collection (here a discerning eye might see that a couple of the spoons came from a head shop in Hollywood). The house held dried ferns, wicker furniture, an odd assortment of rocking chairs, a hand-turned oak banister, framed advertisements from long ago, framed pictures of flowers from National Geographies of the 1920s-phlox, gentian, evening primrose, wintergreen, bird's-foot violet and figwort-little bottles, ancient mirrors, failing philodendrons, warmth, pleasantness and no guests...
...long ago is it?-80-odd years." Those were Abraham Lincoln's words, spoken to a crowd gathered around the White House on a July evening in 1863, just after the crucial Union victory at Gettysburg. He would use the same thought, transformed into the rather more memorable "Four score and seven years ago" to open his address dedicating the cemetery at Gettysburg the following November. This engaging anecdote is just one of the many historical delights in A New Birth of Freedom: Lincoln at Gettysburg by Philip B. Kunhardt Jr. (Little, Brown; 263 pages; $22.50). Kunhardt...