Word: ruining
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...years Franconia drifted toward ruin under an interim president. Then the trustees hired Botstein, who was completing his Ph.D. in history at Harvard and working as a special assistant to the president of the New York City board of education. He had little administrative experience when he acquired the distinction of being perhaps the youngest president in American higher education, but improbably enough, he has turned out to be a smashing success. In less than three years he has improved conditions at the college to the point that it expects to receive full accreditation...
...unpredictable New England weather can do more than ruin practices, however. As Coach Lee said yesterday, "The weather's never any bargain....last year it was a fiasco. Most of the matches were played in the rain...
...occasionally published house organ constitutes demanding, full-time employment. His Manhattan mistress and his favorite bartender believe he is an agent for the CIA. To keep body and body together in town while financing family life in Connecticut, Howard secretly sells real estate. To him an old ruin is a "very good house for learning household skills...
...though he is in poignant sympathy with the Japanese. "Worshiping the flesh's health and beauty," says Vidal, "is as valid an aesthetic-even a religion-as any other, though more tragic than most, for in the normal course half a life must be lived within the ruin of what one most esteemed...
Another esteemed ruin, as far as Vidal is concerned, is the 18th century radicalism of the Declaration of Independence. In writing of contemporary American piety, hypocrisy or corruption, he evokes the ghost of Daniel Shays, a veteran of the American Revolution who led a futile rebellion against the propertied founding fathers when they sought to replace the confederation of states with a central government empowered to collect taxes. Shays, says Vidal with obvious approval, sounding a little like a Dixiecrat, "did not want London to be replaced by New York." Still the Property Party, as Vidal calls those who rule...