Word: richness
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...Moment (1987) A convicted bank robber, after serving nine years in prison, has become a rich and famous media celebrity. A TV producer decides to bring him together with the mousey clerk who foiled the robbery. This provocative and prescient satire of the distorting mirror of reality TV would seem made to order for American audiences. Alas, nothing doing...
That puts a lot of pressure on the prose, but Whitehead, whose writing earned him a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2002, makes the surface idiom-rich and plenty compelling. Benji is a Coke fiend (the drink, not the drug - he's a good kid), and 1985 was the year of New Coke, an announcement that hit him hard. "It was as if someone had popped the top of the world," he says, "and let all the air out." The simile perfectly fits the crime...
...high cost of caring for horses has sometimes led some owners to abandon their animals, to sell them to slaughterhouses or to attempts at fraud in order to collect insurance. But polo is a rich man's sport and Vargas certainly does not seem to have been hurting from the care and feeding of his steeds - or skimping on providing for them. His Lechuza Caracas polo team plays around the world, and he transports his stable of 60 ponies - estimated to cost about $100,000 each - on special jets...
...official exchange rate of about 2.15 bolivares to the U.S. dollar and the quasi-legal black-market rate of almost six to the dollar. Vargas has long denied the accusation, insisting he's not part of the "boli-bourgeoisie" (named for Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution) that got rich cozying up to Chávez while oil prices skyrocketed in recent years. He and his friends say instead that he's simply a banker Chávez officials have found trustworthy, a man who can deal in capitalist circles but who funds three foundations for the poor and deep...
...21st-century socialism." In a rare interview last year, he told the Wall Street Journal, "People write stories about me saying I have a Ferrari, a plane, a yacht. But it's not true. I've got three planes, two yachts, six houses. I've been rich all my life!" In 2004, his daughter Margarita wed Luis Alfonso de Borbón, a cousin of Spain's King Juan Carlos, great-grandson of the late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a legitimate heir to the non-existent throne of France. They were married at Vargas' palatial mansion in the Dominican...