Word: scam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...harrowing anecdotes are told with apparent amusement that makes them all the scarier. The group leader recalls falling into the men's movement as a scam after a sexual-harassment case ended his college teaching career. Wendt depicts, with Normesque what-the-hey gestures and overstuffed teddy-bear charm, how he plunged far beyond his means to display machismo to fellow traders in the pit. These men clearly ought to be in search of something. But they can't see the forest or the trees...
...used to be that there was an easy explanation for this-the existence of the minor leagues. The elaborate pre-majors professional system provoked scores of high school phenoms to eschew their parents' wishes and scam to Cuba, Kansas, or Paris, Texas, to begin blazing their trails to the majors...
...Thatcher written under the pseudonym Emma Lathen by Mary Jane Latsis, an economist, and Martha Henissart, an attorney. All the plots center on financial skulduggery, and almost invariably the villain is the least developed principal character, typically a faceless mid-level manager who shows unrecognized ingenuity in concocting a scam. The team's prose is always easy and mildly amusing. While offering less psychological insight than the average TV sitcom, it convincingly conveys the general corporate mindset and the nubby details of an industry, this time home appliances. The liveliest scenes depict Thatcher's bickering colleagues; the folkways and preening...
...some prep-school applications, persuaded a friend to steal high school transcript forms, wrote glowing reference letters and actually succeeded in being admitted to the prestigious Hill School in Pennsylvania. Years after he and his brother had got to know and love each other again, he admitted the scam to the somewhat more proper Geoffrey, who, profoundly shocked and sure he was seeing a reincarnation of their calamitous dad, said in groaning despair, "Oh, Toby...
...chance in the first place. She signed him up for the promotion at a local K Mart store last year. When the winner's envelope came last August, telling him he had beat out 2 million other contestants, Bobby was, well, suspicious. "I thought it was a scam," he says. "I told Vickie that as long as nobody asked for any credit cards or money, I'd go along with it." Although he had never played basketball as a kid, he planted a brand-new Slam Dunk hoop in his gravel driveway last September and began to practice. Sort...