Word: ransoms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...looking disheveled, and a tape recording in which he supposedly agreed, à la Patty Hearst, with his captors' aims. "He is a bourgeois and represents the exploiting class," said the kidnapers' proclamation. "We social fighters are obliged to use revolutionary means." The group demanded $1.6 million in ransom and the release often political prisoners, all leftists. Both requests were officially ignored by the government. Then last Saturday he was released, but it was not disclosed what-if anything-his kidnapers got in return...
...crime involved is kidnaping, not for ransom but rather as a comeuppance for an old grudge. Colette Delavigne, aged 27, is a judge in the juvenile courts and the pretty offspring of a brilliant haute bourgeois family. Colette is married to Bernard, a rich young executive who sells yogurt but is by her standards a social inferior. When a spiteful villager abducts their eight-year-old daughter as part of an ongoing vendetta against Colette's family, the Delavigne marriage is further strained...
Died. John Crowe Ransom, 86, poet, critic and longtime editor of the Kenyan Review; in Gambier, Ohio. Widely acclaimed for his poems, which were distinguished by compressed emotion expressed in courtly rhetoric, Ransom was also an influential teacher. As an instructor at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s, the Tennessee-born Rhodes scholar shepherded the Fugitives, a flock of young Southern poets (including Allen Tate and Robert Perm Warren) who celebrated the virtues of Southern agrarianism in defiance of the machine age. In 1937 Ransom moved to Kenyon College, where he attracted such poets as Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell...
...managed to hold off the invasion with light scholarly musket fire. Statistics and averages are misleading. (Everyone knows the story of the nonswimming statistician who drowned in trying to wade a river with an average depth of three feet.) Sociologists are well known for expending a king's ransom on graph paper, conferences and field work to prove something that everybody knows, e.g., there is some likelihood you will marry the girl next door. Besides, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once said, "Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answers...
Like a number of people now concerned with the problem (TIME, May 13), McPhee assumes that sooner or later someone will do it and will hold a city, or cities, at ransom. The motive might be idealism or simple criminality. Whatever his (or their) reasons, McPhee notes, the bomb makers would have to establish credibility and so presumably would make two bombs. The first would be set off as a free sample, and the second would be offered at a price...