Word: strains
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...character named Richard Nixon narrates nearly every other chapter in the novel, where the best and worst in Coover's method coexist with greatest strain. His portrait of an ambitious, insecure and privately obsessed public man is remarkably comprehensive and even moving. If only the character were not named Nixon, all would be well. But Coover allows no distinction between his fiction and the living man; much of the humor depends on a knowledge of the real Nixon's career. As the fictional Nixon's humiliations increase (he is made to appear seminude in front...
...Rolfe nourished a grand obsession: to become a Roman Catholic priest. But he was expelled from two seminaries, one in Britain, one in Rome, where he continued to paint and photograph, cavalierly charging materials to the bishops who sponsored him. His superiors may have detected an even more distressing strain. Rolfe was in the habit of employing pen, camera and oils to attract young men. The results could be artful sublimations-poems or paintings exalting saintly martyrs. But when he was candid, as in his "Ballade of Boys Bathing" ("Wondrous limbs ... lithe round arms"), the poet made his role...
...criminal court in Brooklyn, TIME'S Paul Witteman reported: "The smell of vomit permeated the lobby. There were puddles of urine on the floor. In one corner, a Hispanic woman shrieked uncontrollably. Court officers administered oxygen to two women who had been felled by the heat and the strain of not knowing what had happened to relatives locked up in the cells. Police broke up a group of people being interviewed by a radio reporter. In the midst of the shouting and shoving, one man was arrested and put behind bars along with the friend for whom...
Carter's actions have taken a good deal of strain out of the relationship between the White House and the AFL-CIO. The President's endorsement of the three bills provided a needed lift for labor, which has been generally outflanked in its legislative battles this year by a revitalized coalition of business lobbyists. At the same time, labor has begun to accept the fact that it no longer wields the clout it once had among congressional Democrats; it needs presidential support and is willing to settle for less than its earlier grandiose goals to obtain...
Scott does not take sides, extract an anticolonial moral from his story or strain after tragic overtones. Such gestures would have shattered a work set so carefully in a minor key. But no one now writing knows or can evoke an Anglo-Indian setting better than Scott...