Word: pasts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...left to him by his father. As the plot progresses to its ironic denouement, Joe courts his teenage sweetheart, rekindles a love affair with the land and comes to terms with some family ghosts -- both dead and alive. Like most McGuane protagonists, Starling is at a gallop between his past and future, an existential cowboy with good intentions and bad habits, determined to take his spiritual malaise by the horns and shake some meaning out of it. He is, in other words, a lot like Thomas McGuane...
...life-affirming influence of his wife Laurie, who is the mother of their daughter Annie, 9. An expert horsewoman in her own right, Laurie helps McGuane deal with his correspondence and critiques his first drafts. If she admits to noticing a change in her husband over the past few years, it is simply that he has become "less cynical...
...snide as in his just closed satire of Iran-contra, Mastergate. But when he becomes cranky about the writer's woeful lot, the show is redeemed by the wit and humanity of David Zippel's lyrics and the zip of Cy Coleman's score, which delights in the past without sinking to pastiche except, maybe, in the close- harmony numbers of a group resembling the Modernaires...
Signs are they haven't done so. Despite a $585 million high-tech makeover for the Postal Service over the past two years, the odds have not improved that a letter will get from Boston to Miami in less time than the sender could drive it there. Performance on first-class mail delivery was at a five-year low in 1988, and complaints about late mail rose 35% last summer. For the workers, automation, heavier mail loads (especially during the Christmas rush) and outside competition have turned a once cushy job into a form of boot camp in eight-hour...
With the hostility has come violence. Hundreds of punches are being delivered along with the mail: the past three years brought 355 attacks by workers on supervisors and 183 by bosses on workers. Last August, John Taylor, a letter carrier in Escondido, Calif., went on a rampage with a rifle, killing two colleagues, his wife and himself. Four other California postal employees committed suicide this year. In May, an irate Boston mail handler in a stolen airplane strafed the city streets with an AK-47. During a 13-hour siege in New Orleans last December, a mail handler shot...