Word: passione
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...people the author knows extremely well. "The characters in the book," he finally admits in the conclusion, "are not a scientifically selected sample, but people whom I happen to have gotten to know." The Oxford historian's wish is nothing short of becoming the cartographer of French passions; he writes that "if only as much were known about human passion as is known about the production of grain or sale of soup...world maps could be drawn showing the regional distribution of attitudes and temperments..." Impressionistic or not, it's a tall order...
...meet individuals mostly, each supposedly filling a pocket of French life. There are three comedians, who turn out to have nothing in common except that they "take defenseless little children seriously. "There are lovers ("The French are moving towards a society of pals, away from an ideal of passion.") There are workers and scattered archetypes: the bourgeois Plane Bourcel who fears the rise of laziness, or "je m'en foutisme"; the Duc de Brossac who does not know the meaning of the word meritocracy. More often, Zeldin offers type and then shatters it (we discover that Brigitte Bardot likes "looking...
...first chapters of the book, however, defeat her. She overwrites, trying to dramatize essentially unexciting background information. We find ourselves mired in such phrases as "that she could embrace his flaws was in the fabric of her passion." A best friend of Jean Harris's, elsewhere sympathetically portrayed, has this stereotype forced upon her. "Ever after, she used the same phrase...'Instant take!' she would exult, tossing back her handsome white-blond head and whinnying like the very expensive palomino pony she much resembles." Alexander's efforts to push this initial descriptive segment of the book to artistic heights falls...
...Trotsky was killed with a pickax, you know. I imagine some day John Carpenter will make a movie of it." Emily Mann, the play's director, is alive to both the passion and the ambiguities in each man's argument and, by staging the piece at a ferocious pace, demonstrates that the drama of ideas can be the most exalted of blood sports...
James Kunen, a long-time friend who delivered one of two eulogies at the memorial service, recalled Short's passion for life: "He was always completely into whatever he was doing." Short's interests run the gamut from softball to the radical politics of the 1980s...