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Second Set: From across the court, I can see into the TV commentator's booth. John McEnroe - whose five-set epic against Bjorn Borg in 1980 was, until this match, considered the gold standard in Wimbledon final history - is gesticulating wildly, re-enacting Nadal's backhand with such eagerness you worry he might fall from his booth onto his cherished court below...
...Politically, these people range from George McGovern to Pat Buchanan; culturally, from Tom Wolfe to Jimmy Buffett. They all acknowledge Thompson's role as a founding figure among the ranks of the new journalists, who, beginning in the 1960s, usefully challenged objectivity as journalism's reigning standard by intruding themselves - their opinions, their emotions, their rages and outrages - into their accounts of the way we lived, publicly and privately, in a very troubled time. The downside of their efforts - especially in Thompson's case - was a highly unreliable subjectivity. It was covered over by Thompson's stylishness and eventually subsumed...
...That's because it's a pretty standard celebrity drama. In the beginning he was a tall, devastatingly handsome young man, with a polite, soft-spoken gift for ingratiation. This he employed to worm his way into the confidence of the Hell's Angels, the outlaw motorcycle gang, becoming a participant-observer in their rites and rituals and writing about them acutely in what I think remains his best book. There followed his Fear and Loathing books about Las Vegas and the political campaign of 1972. These books had their moments, of course, but there was something hysterical about...
...returning to the shack where his youngest daughter was murdered three years earlier. God, or Papa, as she is known in the book, has invited Mack over to talk love, pain and more love. (The Jew is Jesus, and the Asian is the Holy Spirit.) The story becomes a standard guy-meets-God melodrama, heavy on the heartstrings and full of torrid and often turgid dialogue. The unorthodoxy of the representation of the Triune deity (Ellen DeGeneres also imagined the Almighty as a black woman in a routine) has delighted some Christians and upset others. William P. Young...
...organize a relief fund. He resolved to make enough money himself, writing and lecturing, to pay back every cent. "Honor is a harder master than the law," he said, sounding considerably more righteous than usual. But it was actually his wife, supported by Henry H. Rogers, an otherwise ruthless Standard Oil exec who had volunteered to manage Twain's money, who insisted he not take an easier...