Word: sosa
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...breezy night in 1979, Mercedes Sosa, the Argentine crooner dubbed "the voice of the voiceless," was arrested along with 200 of her fans during a concert in La Plata. Sosa's crime was singing out against the brutal military regime that was ruling Argentina with violence and terror and making political dissidents disappear. Were it not for her voice, Sosa would probably have vanished too. Instead, she was released and told never to return to the country. "I had no place to sing," she later recalled. "So I had to go look for applause in Europe...
...Sosa, who died Oct. 4 at 74, had no trouble finding applause. By the time she returned to her homeland in 1982, mere months before the dictatorship collapsed, she had captivated audiences on five continents. And while she pined for the sights and smells of her childhood--even those that evoked memories of the death, pain and poverty she witnessed--her time in exile exposed her to entirely new styles of music. Jazz, pop and rock 'n' roll complemented her roots in Andean and tango rhythms and boosted a six-decade career in which she performed with singers as diverse...
...care about baseball before the strike in 1994, my earliest memories come from the record-breaking power surge of the late ’90s. Like every fan my age and older, I remember the summer of 1998 for the moments spent scurrying to the nearest TV whenever Sosa or McGwire threatened the records of Ruth and Maris. That summer’s hardball fireworks happened to coincide with a brief hiccup that served as nothing more than a semicolon in a decade-long, run-on sentence of previously unimaginable financial growth. As I was 10 years old, it would...
...Today, McGwire and Sosa are personae non gratae in Cooperstown, and 1998 stands as a glaring reminder of what now appears so obvious: that the good times of the late ’90s were built on something other than Big Mac’s hard-scrabble midwestern work ethic or the Caribbean, Garcia-Marquez-esque, mythical mastery of Slammin’ Sammy. Rather, they were fueled by a toxic cocktail of steroids and willful ignorance...
...Steroids did not give McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, or any other pariahs the ability to hit major-league pitching. All but the most ardent moralists and car-radio screamers would grant that most of the now tarnished stars of baseball’s Juiced Era were skilled ballplayers even without the aid of chemical enhancement. PEDs let great athletes leverage their skills to even higher, previously unimaginable levels. They enabled marginal athletes to make massive sums of money playing a kids game. And they allowed baseball to return to the glory it had lost in the 1994 strike...