Word: pupil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...MCKELLEN Apt Pupil; Gods and Monsters...
This put him in conflict with his coach, the almost equally legendary Bill Bowerman (Sutherland), no mean athletic aesthetician himself. He's presented as a more forgiving and gently eccentric kind of obsessive, disapproving of his pupil's stubborn individuality but also watchfully guarding a passion for excellence that matches his own. Theirs is a marvelously subtle wrangle: Prefontaine ran Bowerman's race in the 5,000 m at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and was beaten; but it was Bowerman who brought him back from self-pity (and maybe self-destruction) and onto the comeback trail before Prefontaine was killed...
Dwelling in the sulfurously lighted basement apartment of Simon's house, Henry is the Devil--a devil, anyway--with a gift for inspiring those he does not repel. An apt pupil, Simon composes a long poem that some people hate ("Drop dead," reads a publisher's rejection note; "keep your day job") but others champion. Simon becomes a literary celebrity, and in gratitude to his mentor says he will insist that his publisher also issue Henry's opus. Then, alas, he reads...
...many ways, Taiwan has been America's star pupil. Under U.S. tutelage Taiwan has modernized its economy, built a thriving democracy, opened up a free press. It is one of the world's leading trading nations and one of the most prosperous. And yet, by succeeding, Taiwan has become a problem for Washington. Taipei's dynamic de facto independence may one day trigger a Chinese ultimatum: blockade or attack. It will then be up to the U.S. to decide whether Taiwan's status quo has a future...
...first we were inclined to think of the tale of the teacher and her sixth-grade lover as mere daytime-television trash in the flesh--the teacher-pupil angle slipping a ghost of incest into the narrative, and no doubt a touch of mental illness. On the other hand, we have gone pretty far in exhausting the categories of the forbidden. The love that dare not speak its name has become public, ordinary and settled into domestic life, as wholesome as Fred MacMurray in a cardigan. The President's penis and its recreations are routinely discussed in public without much...