Word: ricks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...academic issues because professionals moving to town want a college-prep curriculum that the system has been slow to provide. Wilmington's system ranks in the bottom quarter of Ohio school districts, according to a Cleveland Plain Dealer study, and sends less than half its graduates to college. Rick and Leslie Chamberlain moved to town thinking the schools would be adequate; they no longer think so. Their oldest child, Jeremy, was an apathetic student who fell in with underachievers at the high school. But because Jeremy wasn't a troublemaker, says Rick, the guidance counselors never noticed him. The more...
...felt pressured to take part in a school track meet instead. While the school board has built new elementary and middle schools to keep up with rising enrollment--and a new high school is in the works--"we've seen no upgrade in the quality of education," says Rick. "When professionals moving here ask me about the schools, I say, 'You may have a problem.'" The superintendent is working to improve the college-prep curriculum, but the Chamberlains have lost patience. They send their 12-year-old to parochial school in a town 30 miles away...
That approach has worked well in Congress, where Paxon, who was first elected in 1988, has as close a bond with moderates like Rick White of Washington as he does with hard-liners of the Largent and Graham variety. Yet it has also opened him up to the charge that he is more committed to winning than to a set of beliefs. Paxon points to his conservative voting record--but quietly casting a vote is different from taking the lead on an ideologically loaded issue. And in his first nine years in Congress, he was never the front...
...Rick Bass drew good reviews in 1992 with The Ninemile Wolves, a moody nonfiction report of a Canadian wolf pack that crossed the U.S. border a few years ago and colonized one of the western states. But Bass's fiction (The Book of Yaak, In the Loyal Mountains) seems to get categorized as good-with-an-asterisk. He's regional. (So was Wallace Stegner, of course, until he became a national monument.) Bass may reach monument or even wilderness-area status in time, but for the moment he gathers honorable obscurity, and blackflies, on the shelf reserved for nature writers...
...view here is, forget that asterisk. With the publication of The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness (Houghton Mifflin; 190 pages; $23), a collection of novellas about men and women in nature, there should be no more avoiding plain truth: Rick Bass is a very good writer of fiction. What's more, he's good at a kind of writing that is often done with irritating self-consciousness. Bringing the natural world into a story as something more than scenery invites a rich array of overdelicate word-painting and drum-roll weather effects, with turning seasons or the death and birth...