Word: self
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...brothers all followed their father in alcoholism. But the real point of this grim but touching account is that parents and siblings, the drinkers and those who stoically enabled others to drink, eventually turned to Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon and were able to rebuild their sense of self and family. "Understanding brought relief and clarification," Somers concludes. "Even if the rest of your family doesn't get better...
There has always been something of the self-delighted mischiefmaker about William F. Buckley Jr., America's Tory toreador. In his summer-weight spy thrillers about the Ivy League CIA agent Blackford Oakes (The Story of Henri Tod, Saving the Queen), the payoff lies partly in the impudence with which Buckley rewrites cold war incidents to include his hero's exploits. This new pastiche begins in early 1963 with failed and sometimes bizarre CIA efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro. U.S. readers are sufficiently detached from the Cuban strongman to see this as comedy, perhaps. But the plot winds...
...sometimes incredulous now at 1968, not only at the astonishing sequence of events but at the intensity, the energy in the air. People lived their lives, of course. And yet the air of public life seemed to be on fire, and that public fire singed the private self. Revolutionary bombast gusted across the wake of elegy for something in America that had got lost, some sense of national innocence and virtue. More than in ordinary times, people thought about death, about spiritual fulfillment, and about transfiguration...
...nation pulsed with music and proclamation, with rages and moral pretensions. "This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius," sang the cast of Hair, which came to Broadway in April. Janis Joplin expressed one side of the year fairly well: ecstatic and self-destructive simultaneously, wailing to the edges of the universe, flirting with the abyss. Joplin, who died of a heroin overdose in 1970, memorably sang Me and Bobbie McGee, the 1969 Kris Kristofferson song that contained a perfect line of 1968 philosophy, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose...
...been put in a defensive mood by U.S. and other foreign criticism of his handling of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear-plant accident. Says Hammer: "Gorbachev's weakness is that he has a temper, and that he flares up, and that he has a lot of pride, of course, and self-confidence." The Soviet leader has generally managed to keep his temper under control in public. Indeed, friends and opponents agree that he is almost invariably polite. But he does blow up now and then -- especially, as foreign TV viewers have discovered, when he is questioned sharply about the Soviet Union...