Word: short
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sometimes, Jordan admits, it is difficult to judge the real intentions of many people he meets. This is especially true in the case of women. Love- struck females swarm around the charismatic Jordan as insistently as do NBA defenders. A few years ago, there was a short-lived romance with actress Robin Givens. Today, despite the hassles, Jordan enjoys an active, and private, social life...
...basic problems could not have been altered by a year of previews: the concept and the star. Legs traces the rise of a big-time gang leader in the machine-gun era of Al Capone. No matter how much the script sweetens and fictionalizes its depiction of the short and brutal life of Legs Diamond, the hero inevitably has blood on his hands...
Joyce Carol Oates, 50, has done nothing of the sort. For the past two decades she has produced roughly a novel a year, plus numerous collections of short stories, criticism and essays. She has written plays and even, two years ago, a nonfiction work on boxing. This frenetic production has hardly destroyed her reputation; she is a literary figure of considerable clout, she holds a tenured professorship at Princeton University, and every fall her name is rumored to be on the short list for the Nobel Prize. But there is something of the sideshow about her renown among the general...
This sudden, inexplicable eruption of violence typifies what many find troubling about Oates' fiction. If the purpose of art is to provide a comprehensible context, an explanatory train of circumstances, for human activity, then Oates certainly falls short. She knows this risk and consistently runs it anyhow. Her obsession remains the untidy world where everyone actually lives, where headlines daily scream out the unthinkable and where nice people find themselves behaving in ways they can barely imagine, much less condone. The McCulloughs' marriage, despite outward appearances, is far from perfect; the author deftly reveals the stresses and fault lines that...
...great extent, the long-term fate of the economy is up to the White House and Congress, while the short-term management rests in Alan Greenspan's hands. All three will have to tinker carefully and deliberately with the creaky recovery if they hope to get many more miles from it. The economy may have survived a stock-market crash in '87, but its ability to handle the tight corners and potholes of '89 and '90 cannot be taken for granted...