Word: restlessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...HELL. But peace is worse; it has all of the violence of war with no prospect of a victory or even a surrender. In Peace Breaks Out, John Knowles returns to the Devon School, setting of his highly-acclaimed A Separate Peace, to explore the theme of restless destructiveness as the natural state of man. But Peace Breaks Out has neither the depth nor the freshness of Knowles' earlier novel. The "rolling fields" and "limitless blue sky" of the New Hampshire countryside seems telescoped into a two-dimensional backdrop, against which Knowles manipulates his characters like a puppeteer...
...complaints have risen again. Some White House colleagues feel he has not assembled his NSC staff swiftly or skillfully enough. Like his patron Meese, he seems to lack an eye for detail. Allen's ego may be smaller than Haig's, but not by much. Ambitious and restless, he may eventually claim more of the deck than he does at present, but he will probably move too adroitly to inspire mutiny...
...reporting on American Renewal was unduly pessimistic about the threat of Communism. The workers of the world have not united, at least not under the same banner. The Soviet Union has very few allies anywhere in the world-far fewer than the U.S. It has satellites populated by increasingly restless populations and dissidents and, in the case of China, the Soviets have a massive and hostile neighbor...
...unfortunately, it also makes one restless. It's just too perfect, and in the end it is, dare one say it, awfully boring. What's crystalline and well-crafted often leaves one cold. When Helprin's not affecting an especially tedious antique style for telling whispy tales of love lost and childhood winters in Vermont, he proceeds with an eloquent lack of inspiration. Neat shaping of sentences and admirable technical confidence do not make up for a lack of that obscure energy that transforms les mots justes into great writing. In some ways the style belongs to the 18th century...
...found deploying this same unique combination of high art, low cunning and surreptitious showmanship. His incarnation of Play wright Shaffer's antagonist, Antonio Salieri, owes much to the offhand technical virtuosity McKellen displayed in that restaurant and even more to an analytic actor's intelligence that is restless and ruth less at once. "If I couldn't defend a performance intellectually, I'd be very un happy indeed," McKellen remarks, and his Salieri is a seamless reconciliation of paradox. It is a portrait in depth of a shallow man, a forgotten 18th century court composer...