Word: old
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...surface after a shooting or other violent episode and allow younger students in particular to act out and talk out the horrors they experienced. Adults are shaken as well. At the Greenwood, S.C., school, Principal Eleanor Rice lost 25 lbs. in the months after a 19-year-old man barged in, shooting at random, killed two pupils and wounded nine other people. To her, the new door locks and limited access to the building are not guarantees against future incidents, but they serve to instill confidence in teachers, pupils and parents. "It has been a rough road," she admits...
...thunderation, the first of four in a reported $30 million to $40 million publishing deal, the author plays with a twist of the old good-twin, bad-twin theme. Novelist Thad Beaumont, who lives in Maine (as does King), collided with writer's block a few years ago and rescued his career by writing four novels under the pseudonym of George Stark (just as King has written five novels as Richard Bachman). These tales, unlike Beaumont's, were violent, brutal and very successful. Now Beaumont, writing on his own again, wants to bury Stark...
...usual, King's prose is fast, simple and sloppy. He has young Beaumont in 1960 use the current slang "get off on," meaning enjoy, and lets an elderly English professor say he will "loan" the hero a car (old pedants say "lend"). The climax has the brutish Stark absurdly trying to write another novel to keep his ectoplasm from sloughing away in rivulets of goo. Characterization is perfunctory, with an odd exception: Beaumont's eight- month-old twin babies are vividly and charmingly described. For King fans this may be the sort of thing that sustains the myth that...
...best part of this volume can be found in the 16 stories following the unfinished novel. Five have never been published, and the rest were never collected in hard covers. It is difficult to imagine why not. Malamud hit his stride early, writing stories of old men trying to preserve their dignity amid the shambles of harsh circumstances. In The Literary Life of Laban Goldman, an elderly Jew attends night school to improve his English and get away from his nagging wife; he experiences a brief moment of triumph when the Brooklyn Eagle publishes his letter to the editor urging...
...jargon of totalitarianism described the Wall. In their jagged sprints, dodging searchlight beams and bullets, they created a theater of longing where the value of freedom -- and the maleficence of its denial -- found an extraordinary visual expression. In 1962, in one of the most publicized instances, 18-year-old Peter Fechter, an East Berlin bricklayer, was cut down by machine-gun fire as he tried to scale the Wall and, in plain view of Western policemen and reporters, was left lying for an hour while he bled to death; finally East German border guards retrieved his body. Fechter...