Word: sterne
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This became clear last week when two men, describing themselves as members of the Black September terrorist organization, personally delivered a stern warning to Sakharov at his Moscow apartment. The two demanded Sakharov's written opinion of the Middle East conflict and ominously informed him: "We'll report your views back to headquarters, and they'll decide what to do with you." The conversation, Sakharov later recounted to friends, got more tense as time went on. At one point, one of the men "jumped like a tiger" to the telephone, where Mrs. Sakharov was standing, and hastily...
...RICHARD G. STERN...
...Habits get you through life, not into it," Merriwether cries, and the male-menopausal debate-life-as-reason-and-light v. life-as-Dionysian-flame-is on. No novelist could improve upon Richard (Golk) Stern's inventory of what Merriwether has to lose. The Stern Cambridge is full of 90-year-old gabled and bay-window-bellied houses, just a gentlemanly stroll from the Square's latest Marx brothers festival. In a hundred Victorian parlors like the Merriwethers', attractive parents and children play recorders and sing lieder or Cole Porter. Leather editions on subjects like Provencal poetry...
...Alas, Stern makes a better case for the middle-aged languors of Cambridge than for the pleasures of Cynthia. His very strengths-irony, elegance of style, that passion for exactness-trip him up. His heart may be romantic, but his mind keeps playing all these little jokes on his lovers. When the professor kisses, deft quotes seem to materialize like subtitles on a screen. Harrumphs of academic self-approval seem to plonk into the nearest pillow as narcissistic asides. No matter how Stern tries to turn loose the Merriwether demon, it insists on fixing its tie, unwildly holding doors open...
This is an attractive book and occasionally an extraordinarily touching one-especially where Stern is dealing with parents' love for children. "Love," he wrote in an earlier novel, "is not a fixed relationship, only a kind of fund that underwrites all sorts of behavior." Other Men's Daughters skillfully illustrates that point again...