Word: ransoming
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...central figure of The Hadrian Ransom (Putnam; 275 pages; $9.95) wins this year's award for Most Unusual Kidnapee: Pope Hadrian IX. The holy heist in Allan Duane's psychological thriller has been planned by three disgruntled Americans and Rosella Asti, daughter of Italy's Ambassador to Washington. While the whole civilized world weeps and prays, the intricately plotted caper goes as smoothly as a sacrament-until the Red Brigades horn in on the action and the $4 million ransom money. The hero in the end is il Papa, a man of great energy, guile and charity...
...been the moving force in the drive to oust Somoza. Their daring raid of a diplomatic reception for the American ambassador on December 27, 1974, and subsequent kidnapping of 11 members of Somoza's inner circle--for which they received the release of 14 political prisoners, $1 million in ransom, a lengthy radio statement, and flight to Cuba--led Somoza to order martial law and censorship of the press on the same night. Crowds lined up on the roads leading to the airport, applauding the Sandinistas, but Somoza did not lift the sanctions until mid- 1977. The Sandanistas also...
...well, a ransom fit for a queen. Not that Elizabeth II was exactly ad venturing for booty, but when Britain's monarch returned home last week from a three-week tour of six Persian Gulf states, she brought back an assortment of trinkets worth an estimated $2 million. Quite a haul, even for someone who is reputed to be the world's wealthiest woman...
...literary periodicals recalled in this lively chronicle range from Partisan Review, left-wing and loudly ideological at its birth in 1934, to Paris Review, a sleek '50s expatriate now based in New York. An entry on John Crowe Ransom reports that the poet started the Kenyon Review because he thought Partisan Review too flashy. Robert Creeley, founder of the Black Mountain Review, says that "to be published in the Kenyan Review was too much like being 'tapped' for a fraternity." United only in their dislike of New York publishing and each other, the little magazines were starting...
...poet, critic and teacher; in Nashville. A Kentuckian who as a boy longed to be another Edgar Allan Poe, Tate was a brilliant, arrogant senior at Vanderbilt University when he was invited to join a group of older poets known as the Fugitives, which included his teacher John Crowe Ransom. Believing that industrialism would ruin the South, Tate was for a time an agrarian and always venerated what he saw as the stability and simplicity of the Old South. He taught at a number of colleges, mainly the University of Minnesota, and helped found the New Criticism, which stressed...