Word: spiros
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This behemothian novel comes from a surprising source. William Safire has largely made his reputation through epigrammatic feistiness and hit-and-run repartee. As a speechwriter in the Nixon White House, he gave Spiro Agnew the epithets and alliterations ("nattering nabobs of negativism") to attack liberal opponents of Administration policies. In 1973 he became a columnist for the New York Times, just as Watergate began to drag his conservative cause and many former colleagues into disrepute. Safire not only survived that debacle but prevailed: he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1978, and his twice-a-week columns continue to display...
...early years of the 19th century, you would find that their understanding of this clause and the Constitution in their judgment allowed them to enact the Alien and Sedition laws. And if those laws were still on the books, Richard Nixon would still be President of the U.S. and Spiro Agnew would still be Vice President, and all of you people would probably be in prison...
...Stanley Spiro's case, the man, the hour, the music and the geography have met. Here you have this Long Island, N.Y., dentist who retires with his wife Thelma to Florida and becomes, in his words, "light-headed, lackadaisical." So he puts together a band, a big band -- Stan Spiro and the Townsmen Orchestra, featuring music in the Glenn Miller mood -- and all of a sudden retirement is a dream, just one long Moonlight Serenade...
...Stan sees the world. He rehearsed his band for ages before he took it public. And when he finally did, it blew the public's hat in the creek, which is to say the band cooked, dig? It was tight. And it is not a stretch to say Stan Spiro and the Townsmen Orchestra came on like a train, to liken them to the Chattanooga Choo Choo...
...floor, old and young rose to dance, some lacking a certain fluidity, but all quite game. The lights from O'Shea's played on the waterfront outside the dance hall, and off in the mangroves of Marco Island an insect combo embellished the Spiro sound with a contrapuntal hum. It was all bloody romantic, and when a paddle-wheeler, the latest O'Shea expansion, came to berth with 100 or so diners aboard, they simply fell to working off their meals aerobically: a waltz to warm up, a jitterbug for the cardiovascular good, a waltz to cool down. "I never...