Word: splendid
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Much of State Shinto was invented, but like many religious cults, it was based on traditions. The 20th century Emperors, in their role as commander of the Imperial Japanese Army, cut Napoleonic figures, riding white horses in splendid military uniforms, but they were also the high priests of State Shinto, donning traditional ceremonial garb and communing with the Sun Goddess in ancient shrines. If the forms were sometimes very old, the idea of the Emperor as the apex of a modern state religion...
Solomon, a musicologist who wrote a splendid biography of Beethoven in 1977, relates these and a host of other incidents smoothly and seamlessly, providing us with just enough of the details of court protocol, carriage rides and commissions that make the late 18th century so exotic. Mozart and the members of his circle come vividly alive-not only his father and remote, tragic mother, but also Constanze, his flighty, second-choice wife who turned professional widow (and mythmaker) after his death; and his cousin Basle, with whom he not only exchanged famously scatological letters but also, Solomon suggests, enjoyed active...
Tomorrow Is Another Country is an oddly bifurcated book. The first half is a splendid and original history of the cloak-and-dagger negotiations that led to Mandela's release in 1990. It is precisely the kind of tale that only a journalistic insider with trusted access to all the players could put together. The second half is less compelling: a more workmanlike, cut-and-paste retelling of the events since 1990, lacking the back-room detail and color that make the book's first half a page turner...
...that he could not walk unaided after his 1921 polio attack. "Not sufficient," says Michael Deland, a board member of the National Organization on Disability, who is confined to a wheelchair. "F.D.R.'s disability was simply too central to his very being." Hugh Gallagher, author of F.D.R.'s Splendid Deception, a book detailing how Roosevelt veiled his disability (only two pictures of him in a wheelchair are among the 125,000 in the Roosevelt library), calls the plans "historically inaccurate." Alan Reich, president of the N.O.D., which claims to reflect the feelings of almost 50 million disabled Americans, says visual...
According to the Unofficial Guide to Life at Harvard, the Harvard Salient was "founded in 1981 by students who sought to provide a journalistic alternative to what they felt was a predominantly liberal campus press." And what a splendid alternative it is. If you want to be liberal, work for Perspective, Lighthouse, HQ or any number of campus publications. If financial insolvency is your thing--perhaps you're a budding turnaround artist--then go work for the Salient...