Word: self
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Fall): "Like a lot of writers, we started out reading Rimbaud and Dostoyevsky, and you think that in order to write you also have to be partly crazy. And later on it occurs to us that we're going to die unless we behave." Realizing that "my streak of self- destructiveness had to end," McGuane quit drinking and poured himself into writing. Two novels -- Nobody's Angel (1982) and Something to Be Desired (1985) -- were followed by To Skin a Cat (1986), a well-received collection of short stories that helped put McGuane back on the literary track...
...McGuane, both urban blight and rural isolation are symptoms of a deeper problem. "I do think that there's a kind of national illness, and I think that every American is touched by it," he says. "It's a by-product of this 20-year wave of narcissism and self-help movements and stuff where people have lost the ability to refer to things larger than themselves, and their reward is solitude. It penetrates Montana as thoroughly as it penetrates Manhattan...
Unusual turns of happenstance conspired to lure the self-effacing Okoye away from the dusty city of Enugu in eastern Nigeria. Son of a onetime army officer, Okoye originally yearned for a soccer career. "It was soccer, soccer, soccer through elementary and high school," he recalls, "but as I grew up, my size made it impossible to go on." Known to schoolboy chums as "Cho-Cho," Okoye turned to track and field with ease. In 1981 an Enugu friend suggested that Okoye apply for a track scholarship at Azusa Pacific University, a small nondenominational Christian college in Southern California...
Three decades after Henry Luce slated him as heir apparent, Hedley Donovan still professes uncertainty as to what virtues the Time Inc. founder saw in deciding he would become (as he did from 1964 to 1979) the company's editor in chief. But readers of Donovan's urbane, frequently self-chiding memoir will be able to guess. He blended a heartland bourgeois regard for American values with a worldly disdain for puffery. He took pride in being able to change his mind -- notably, on Viet Nam and Richard Nixon. In chronicling his life from the rectitude of a Minnesota boyhood...
...sneak preview of the latest Tom Clancy effulgence? Hardly. This frightening scenario of Soviet collapse, titled Nevozraschenets (The Non- Returnee), was published last June in Iskusstvo Kino, the official journal of the Soviet movie industry. Its appearance reflects a mood of unprecedented pessimism and self-doubt, in which intellectuals and political figures have been speculating somberly about the catastrophes that could befall the Soviet Union if perestroika falls apart. Last September, for example, political oppositionist Boris Yeltsin, a former Moscow party boss, repeatedly warned of an impending disaster. "We are on the edge of an abyss," Yeltsin told a rapt...