Word: taut
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...East Germany it remained uncertain whether the Communist Party's last- ditch effort to fashion a new identity could save it from extinction. With the party's upper echelon disgraced, the taut discipline snapped down below. A half million of the 2.3 million cardholders have deserted the party in recent weeks, and last week middle-ranking members joined the opposition groups in crying for the departure of the power brokers who for 41 years imposed their rule. Citizens worked with the regular People's Police to prevent the shredding and theft of incriminating documents. Airline flights to Rumania were suspended...
MYSTERY OF THE ROSE BOUQUET. Jane Alexander and Anne Bancroft play a nurse and a patient in a taut psychological study by Manuel Puig, author of The Kiss of the Spider Woman, at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles...
...taut and stirring as A Theft was, The Bellarosa Connection is even better. Bellow here stands squarely on the ground that he conquered long ago: the dislocations -- wrenching, comic or both -- of being Jewish in America. Bellow's narrator, a man in his early 70s, never reveals his own name, but he engagingly -- and a bit smugly -- displays the trappings of his success: "I force myself to remember that I was not born in a Philadelphia house with 20- foot ceilings but began life as the child of Russian Jews from New Jersey." He had earned his mansion, plus...
There is no posturing, however, in the taut, emotion-driven chapter that tells of his father's death at age 54. Surgery to remove a cancer-infected lung disclosed that the disease had spread, inoperably. Reynolds, then a junior at Duke University, was at his bedside, holding the "warm, dead flesh" of Will's wrist, when the end came. He heard "a high moan, an eerie whistle." As Will's head pressed deep into the pillows, "the eyes stayed shut but the skin of his face turned purple, and the hard wave rolled downward from mind to feet...
BOOKS: Le Carre hits his old pace in a taut new thriller...