Word: passion
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is of course some irony in the Russian passion for books. Knowing the power of written words, Russian authority has for centuries accorded books the brutal compliment of suppression. It has slain books by other means than fire. Book publishing first flourished in Russia under Catherine the Great, and yet it was she who used local police, corrupt and ignorant, to enforce the country's first censorship regulations. Czar Nicholas I conducted a sort of terrorism against certain books and writers. He functioned as personal censor for Pushkin and banished Dostoyevsky to Siberia. Revolution only encouraged the Russian candle...
...Buckley that emerges from John Judis' equitable biography is a versatile though not especially complex man. He establishes most of his positions from two fixed points: his Roman Catholic faith and his anti-Communist passion. Understanding his motives and drives, however, requires some adjustment. Most liberals consider Buckley a member of the privileged class. But as Judis describes him, Buckley sees himself as an outsider and counterrevolutionary battling entrenched atheism, collectivism and moral relativism...
RUBEN BLADES: NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH (Elektra). The Panamanian sensation's first all-English album is a stone dazzler. A bold, totally successful mix of Latin pop, jazz, rock, doo-wop and unflung street passion...
...seem a poor bet. In addition to the rebuff on principle, women shunned the mini for economic reasons. "Especially since the October crash, people are more cautious," says Karen Guthrie, 30, a title-insurance company manager in Los Angeles. "Now even yuppies have budgets." In a fit of fashion passion, Susan Rockford, 40, a Manhattan attorney, plunked down $1,000 for a sexy little suit but soon recovered. "It could go out of style in six months," she sighs. "I returned...
This colorful crew is self-satirizing. Any moralizing comment on their behavior would be superfluous. As for the central triangle (a cad, a cuckold and a tin-hearted tart deluded into thinking she has at last found a grand passion), it is too banal to awaken much emotion. Nor is there any point in using these figures from a remote society for social criticism. No, Radford has done the right thing with his material by observing the exaggerated tonalities of glamour-trash fiction. As a result, White Mischief plays as something a lot of people claim to have been missing...