Word: strains
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Perhaps Spring Snow's most attractive quality is a strain of humor seldom found in Mishima. His Tokyo aristocrats are amusingly caught between East and West, lavishly mounting their ancient rituals and becoming expert billiard players. When Satoko becomes engaged, the palace discreetly passes the word that this flower of culture, versed in poetry and calligraphy, must learn to play mah-jongg because that is her future mother-in-law's favorite diversion. As for her fiancé, the Imperial Highness, his only known opinions are on Western music. When his proud mother asks him to "play some...
More ominously, the situation may strain an already uneasy truce between Baghdad and the dissident Kurds of the north, who claim ownership of the Kirkuk oilfield, which has been shut down ever since it was nationalized. "If there is to be a stoppage of national development, you can be sure the Kurds will be the first to feel it," said Dara Towfik, editor of the Baghdad-based Kurdish paper Al Ta'Khee, last week. Besides complaining that they have been shortchanged on development funds, Kurds feel that Baghdad has cheated on the terms of their truce. Kurd Leader Mustafa...
...tradition is more sacred and vital to the U.S.-or any democracy -than the supremacy of civilian authority over the military. Limited wars such as Korea and Viet Nam put unusual strain on the bonds of the tradition. In Korea, it cost General Douglas MacArthur his command; in Viet Nam, it led General William Westmoreland to liken his job to fighting with one hand tied behind his back. But until General John Lavelle, Viet Nam had produced no outright defiance of presidential strictures on the conduct...
...part calls for him to perform a couple of vaudeville turns, imitating the Mitteleuropäischer doctor who first diagnosed the child's brain damage and a batty vicar who tries to help. Bates pushes for the comedy as he does for almost every other emotion, and the strain shows. Miss Suzman, who last appeared as Alexandra in Nicholas and Alexandra, is good when Sheila is tough and tart but bad when she is tender. When she recalls finding Joe playing with building blocks in a way that just for that one moment gave faint promise of normality, Miss...
...Jack was killed, it fell to Ted to tell their paralyzed father. It took him a day to bring himself to do it, as it did later to report the accident at Chappaquiddick. The most crushing tragedy, of course, was Robert Kennedy's death. Hersh points to the "strain of rather unusual male tenderness, a kind of unabashed motherliness that crops up among Kennedy men." As the youngest child, Ted loved "high jinks and excited fun and a good many drinks sometimes." His secretary notes that the long hospital stay after his own near-fatal plane crash...