Word: soldierly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...young wife Paige goes septic after he is rejected for tenure at his New Hampshire university. Glen is a decent fellow. He was an assembly-line worker in Detroit as a young man, before he quit and revived an interest in the German language begun when he was a soldier in Europe. Paige is petulant and self-absorbed. She disapproves of his besotted love for their four-year-old daughter ("so working class") and grumps when he has a perfectly understandable affair with a pretty grad student...
Author Weesner, a professor of German at the University of New Hampshire, tries to air out his novel with long, wistful passages recounting Glen's bittersweet entanglement with a married German woman when he was a young soldier. These sections work as a love story but, told in retrospect, simply point toward the hero in sour middle age. Scenes of the Berlin Wall coming down are clumsily atmospheric; East Germany is free and Glen at last has his divorce, but the connection is stagy. Maybe the moral is, Write about what you know, sure, except if what you know...
...after that near-miss, a 26-year-old former Army soldier bought a Chinese-made Norinco assault rifle in Colorado Springs...
Without making a big deal about it, Lancaster had artistic ambitions. Early on he smartly inhabited characters created by prestige dramatists: the returning soldier in Arthur Miller's All My Sons, the drunken husband in William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba, the buffoonish Italian suitor (a terrific turn) in Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tatoo...
...whole of Israel recoiled in horror. Only 10 days earlier, Souwi's cohorts in the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, had kidnapped an Israeli soldier, eventually executing him and killing one commando involved in a rescue attempt. Others had sprayed a pedestrian mall in downtown Jerusalem with machine-gun fire, killing two. Now Tel Aviv, the country's most cosmopolitan and carefree city, where Israelis feel most removed from the conflict with their neighbors, was under attack. The force of Souwi's bomb was so intense that the bus was reduced to fragments. Parts of victims were blown ; through windows...