Word: reals
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Becker's story is based on a real incident. On May 11, 1865, 32 days after Lee surrendered and 18 days before President Andrew Johnson declared an amnesty for all rebel soldiers, a Union firing squad executed Thomas Martin outside Cincinnati for being a Confederate guerrilla-even though the case against him was never proved...
...central figure is 1st Lieut. Marius Catto. The 24-year-old lieutenant is an orphan who feels that the Union Army is his first real home, a bumbling but compassionate leader, an idealistic virgin consumed by lust. Catto manages to get himself shot in the shoulder by Martin mainly out of sheer carelessness. He feels no animosity toward the boy, and while recuperating from his wound, Catto fights the court-martial and the subsequent execution with an increasingly anguished awareness of the complexities of life. "What had been a duel, lost honorably and without resentment, became a charade, himself...
...impact of the book is a shocking and melancholy reminder that men, in war or peace, always must go on living with an accumulation of such crimes. Becker quotes the real Judge William Martin Dickson of Cincinnati, writing after the boy's death: "But why revive these harrowing incidents of the war? As well ask, why tell the story of the war at all? If it is to be told, let us have the whole. Let the young not be misled." Like Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Stephen Becker's book explores the whole...
...aside to Cervantes, the ringmaster unveils the secret of his own technical trickery, the warping of time, the myth turned real and reality fantasized. "Your stories also exemplified the dual nature of all good narrative art: they sallied forth against adolescent thoughtmodes and exhausted art forms, and returned home with new complexities." Although Coover is often tediously complex, there is a certain madness in his method that just as often delights...
...Marianne pointed out, as did everyone I talked to the inequities of abortion practices. "One of the real problems with the law is that it punishes the young, unmarried, and relatively stable girls. If a girl doesn't have any obvious mental problems, isn't a heavy drug user and is not considering suicide, she has a harder time getting an abortion than if she had been seeing a psychiatrist for three years...