Word: rootlessly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Embassy is set, like all his other books, abroad. It is a collection of short stories with continuing characters, most of whom belong to the staff of the American Embassy in London. The milieu of the foreign service career is appropriate for the sorts of people Theroux writes about rootless by nature, somewhat surprised at having aged so quickly without realizing it, and with a nagging suspicion that in all their travels they have always missed out on something, although they're not quite sure what...
...feel, during an attack, the infusion of adrena line into the bloodstream, the craving of the muscles for violent action." For most of this century, Arthur Koestler lived by those words. Last week at his home in London, he died by them at the age of 77. The "rootless cosmopolitan," as he styled himself, had been an ardent supporter of "autoeuthanasia," and when the suffering of old age and disease grew in supportable, he reportedly took a lethal dose of drugs. His third wife, Cynthia, 56, joined him in the apparent double suicide. Koestler's act was in keeping...
...country songs, which do not fit the brassy Broadway banalities of Carol Hall's basic score. On the other hand, as is generally the case when shows are restaged in a realistic movie context, the original numbers do not work either. They come out of nowhere and blow, rootless as tumbleweeds, across the Texas landscape. The writing is aimless when it is not offensive, and the picture appears to have been agglomerated rather than directed. Burning's achievement in the midst of all this incompetence is not just a high point; it is something like a miracle...
...most visible problem in this rootless region is crime. South Floridians talk about crime the way people elsewhere talk about sports or politics. Listen, for example, to Carole Masington, the wife of an attorney, who lives in a well-to-do suburb of South Miami: "We had two manhunts in my neighborhood in one week. One friend was mugged, another was assaulted and raped. My favorite storekeeper was beaten and hospitalized, and my mother was robbed twice. And I am just one person." Or hear the Rev. Paul MacVittie, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in downtown Miami...
...What made Hansen so effective (and earned Nicholson an Oscar nomination) was his innocence and honest dreaming, contrasted with the others. When the two hippies get blown away at the end, sure, you hate the hicks for doing it, but it's hard to feel deep loss when the rootless bikers are such egotistical fuck-ups; are they the future of America? But when lofty idealist George Hansen is killed in his sleep near a campfire that has recently glowed with hope for humanity, never knowing what hit him, your gut plummets. Is this America...