Word: reads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Bush, who once served at the U.N. and thus knows whereof he speaks, will argue that Dukakis' faith in international law is naive. There is something quite unnerving, say Dukakis' critics, about the idea of a President who has actually read the Rio Treaty. A more serious argument against multilateralism is that it can degenerate into a de facto isolationism; in a dirty and dangerous world, the U.S. could be paralyzed if it flinched whenever its allies were reticent...
This "retroactive" plague, as Andrew Holleran calls the AIDS epidemic in Ground Zero (Morrow; 228 pages; $16.95), is causing not only panic but a radical change in sensibilities. Phrases like "oral sex" and "anal penetration," once startling to read outside hard-covers, are now routinely bounced off satellites with the weather reports. "Making love," one of the sweetest phrases in the language, now suggests a cause of death. Still, the world is sharply divided into the sick and the well, and AIDS can be something of a lark if you are a robust heterosexual college student at a safe...
...Hoffman, on the other hand, understand the first law of writing about personal misfortune: appalling facts, tersely put, speak for themselves. Holleran has the advantage of being a gifted novelist (Dancer from the Dance) with a keen, ironic intelligence. "Someday," he says, "writing about this plague may be read with pleasure, by people for whom it is a distant catastrophe, but I suspect the best writing will be nothing more, nor less, than a lament . . . The only other possible enduring thing would be a simple list of names -- of those who behaved well, and those who behaved badly...
...Williams he got daily letters from her; she read all his major texts so she could trade notes on them. To help pay tuition, Bennett waited on tables and worked summers hauling furniture while earning honors, playing football and strumming a rock guitar -- the very model of the 1960s liberal student. Civil rights concerns nudged him toward the liberal Students for a Democratic Society, which later turned violently radical. But Brother Bob talked him out of it, advising that some day S.D.S. might not look good on his resume...
...goes, through a list of correspondents that includes most of the types who dwell on the literary life's ragged edges. The unpublished writer who aggressively demands that Bradbury read her last seven novels (enclosed) is turned aside with a compliment ("Be reassured, a masochistic and paranoid temperament is a well-known sign of a great writer") and a practical suggestion ("May I recommend a pseudonym -- something like John le Carre"). The young academic confronting his first job interview is reminded that he must dress both down (there is always a raging egalitarian on the committee who resents Oxbridge college...