Word: pivots
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...French TV every Friday night, right after a dubbed version of Miami Vice, it is something of a national event. Some 6 million people tune in faithfully -- cab drivers as well as business executives, concierges as well as intellectuals. But even more remarkable than the lofty status of Bernard Pivot is the subject of his program: books...
...Pivot is host of Apostrophes, an urbane 90-minute discussion of literature and ideas with some of the world's most famous authors. Henry Kissinger has appeared, as have French Presidents Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Francois Mitterrand. Most weeks, however, writers like Saul Bellow, Carlos Fuentes, Gunter Grass, Milan Kundera, Susan Sontag and others of lesser renown are the stars...
...talk show that is both highly rated and uncompromisingly literary would be dismissed by U.S. television executives as a contradiction in terms, an impossibility. But in France, intellectuals are often as celebrated as movie stars, even among nonreaders. In a recent survey of French viewers, 38% said Pivot was their favorite TV personality. (His closest competition: a German shepherd named Junior who is featured on a hit show about pets.) Nor is his popularity an exclusively French phenomenon. Apostrophes is also seen in Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, French-speaking Africa, Poland and even on a cable channel in Manhattan...
Apostrophes (the name comes from both the punctuation mark and the word for a rhetorical statement) is so successful at boosting book sales in France that Pivot reigns as the most influential literary figure in the country. "Ask a publisher or bookstore owner what it would be like without Pivot," declared the French newsmagazine Le Point, "and then look at the expression on his face. It's one of a lone sailor at sea who's just lost the mast of his ship...
...after another. His resignation last week gave Ronald Reagan the chance to tilt the court more sharply to the right, perhaps for decades, by appointing a more sternly and consistently conservative Justice. Said Paul Gewirtz, professor of law at Yale: "This is not just another vacancy. This is the pivot point in the next generation of American constitutional...