Word: present
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...should swoon over Gorbachev and confuse him for a liberal reformer intent on bringing political freedom to the oppressed peoples of the communist bloc. Nor should one forget that a bloated bureaucracy and an entrenched party still present formidable obstacles to Gorbachev's reforms...
...Tennessee side, people complain that the river's repugnant color and stench contribute to Cocke County's prolonged economic doldrums by discouraging tourists and development. With an unemployment rate currently averaging 15%, Cocke Countians openly envy the relative prosperity in Haywood County, home of the paper mill (present unemployment average: 6%). Says Cocke County Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Robert Seay, co-founder of the Dead Pigeon River Council, which wants to clean up the stink: "It's completely unfair for one county to use the river and have a ((low)) unemployment rate, and 50 miles downstream here...
...extraordinary publishing enterprises greet each other this month, just as their subjects did more than 80 years ago. The final entries in George Bernard Shaw's four-volume, 76-year-long correspondence present the master playwright bombinating into old age, dispensing unsolicited advice on every aspect of modern life from the flaws of the cinema to the indignities of sex. The first of a projected 20 volumes of Mark Twain's letters follows the literary apprentice -- at first still using his real name, Samuel Clemens -- as he flees Hannibal, Mo., to become a river pilot, then a journalist covering...
...certifiable American eccentrics. So says David Weeks, a clinical psychologist at Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Scotland, who has just published a scientific study of 130 British oddballs, past and present. Among them: Samuel Johnson, the rotund 18th century author who amused friends by rolling down steep hills, and Prince Charles, who talks to plants, if not to his wife Princess Diana. The British study, however, is only a warm-up for a nearly completed analysis of 800 American eccentrics. The tentative conclusion: the U.S. has displaced Britain as the uncontested eccentricity capital of the world. Declares Weeks, a native...
...sparkle when she talks of being reunited with her sister and starting a new life in the West. "I want to sing in a choir," she says. "And I'd like a dog. Our apartment here is too small for one." But beneath her infectious optimism dwells an ever present anxiety. "It's very hard for me here," Vera Zieman says quietly. "Sometimes I'm very frightened...