Word: passione
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...disclosing what parts of his story are invented. He notes that a love affair between Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky and Anna Ella Carroll, a pro-Union pamphleteer, did not really happen. The trouble is, it hardly happens in the narrative either. When Breckinridge and Carroll get together, the passion they expend takes the form of abstract debate: "Two nights before, in her rooms at the Ebbitt House, they had stayed up through the dawn arguing the details of the ( President's war power." So much for titillation...
Enid Stevick is clearly intended to be a victim of her time, but she is also a willing prisoner of passion. One of Oates' main subjects has always been the irrational nature of intense feelings. Love, says Warren near book's end, "seems to carry with it no knowledge." The same could be said of lust, fear and anger, emotions that are generously apportioned to the novel's characters. The effect is dramatic but limiting, like old-fashioned literary naturalism in which free will is swamped by determinism and animal instincts...
Across the Netherlands, from the busy Rotterdam docks to the gleaming electronics plants of Eindhoven, the Dutch, who have always loved a rousing moralistic argument, are indulging in just that heady passion. The debate, which focuses on the proper balance between freedom and license, is echoed in all the industrialized democracies. In fact, the rates of divorce, juvenile crime and unwed motherhood remain lower in the Netherlands than in most other European countries and the U.S. "Let us remember that we have an open society, a nice, friendly, clean country," says Cees van Lede, president of the Federation of Netherlands...
...when the time came for the speech Reagan didn't duck, and won't. He let the critics take their shots: "The old Reagan magic, the energy and passion are gone," said the dyspeptic conservative Richard Viguerie. "He should have had Ollie North write his speech, but instead he was on the defensive." Democrats just shook their heads over the scandal's unresolved issues and condemned a misguided Chief Executive. Rebutted Maine's Senator George Mitchell: "Let there be no misunderstanding. The mistakes were not only in the execution of policies. The major mistakes were in the policies themselves...
...treason, not the passion, that has to carry the movie. Judged as a pure suspense movie, No Way Out doesn't rank up there with 39 Steps or Dr. No. It does toss in a clever conclusion--casting the rest of the plot in a more intriguing, although confusing, light--but no snappy ending can compensate for an hour's worth of mediocre machinations...