Word: stricklands
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...Stan Strickland--the Western Front...
Since the Wood vs. Strickland Supreme Court decision of 1975, which upheld the right to due process of students accused of troublemaking, the number of students expelled from school has dropped by about 30%. As always in a democracy, the problem of expulsion turns in part on the question of concern for the rights of the disruptive individual vs. the rights of classmates and of society. School officials argue that it is wiser and more humane to keep a violent or disruptive student in school than to turn him loose on the streets. But, says John Kotsakis of the Chicago...
...simplest moral of this quiet, affecting novel might be: Don't Read Tolstoy. John Strickland, 40, is a successful London barrister who casually picks up The Death of Ivan Ilych during an August retreat at the home of his wife's parents. The lawyer finds himself deeply rattled by the Tolstoy hero's mounting despair, especially by the question Ilych asks himself: "Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done?" Querying himself in the same manner, Strickland realizes that he loathes his career, the expensive trappings of his upper-middle-class existence...
...ensuing judgment, not surprisingly, is unfavorable. During the winter of 1973-74, with the English unions and the Conservative government locked in strikes and threats, Strickland becomes active in Labor Party politics, on the side all his well-to-do friends detest. He thinks he is rekindling the socialist torch he carried when young, but his wife Clare scalds him: "You're addicted to your own self-importance and like a real junkie you need bigger and bigger doses to keep going." Strickland also becomes embroiled in an affair with an enormously rich young woman and realizes, belatedly, that...
Daydreaming about the death of a spouse is a punishable offense in the world of this novel, particularly when the dreamer has a girlfriend with limitless funds and a small portfolio of scruples. When Clare does indeed die violently, Strickland and the London police seem curiously unwilling to suspect the one person who had most to gain from the murder...