Word: thackeray
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...built his home of plywood, with an outhouse out back and a root cellar below and two walls filled floor to ceiling with Shakespeare and Thackeray and bomb manuals. Sometimes he would stay inside for weeks at a stretch. You could smell him coming, steeped in woodsmoke, dressed in black or sometimes fatigues, riding a one-speed bike cooked up out of spare parts. He wouldn't make small talk, often wouldn't even finish a sentence. The dogs figured him out long before the feds did. "All the dogs hated him," recalled Rick Christian, 48, a longtime local. "They...
...bombs, not his trademarks, not any sloppy mistake that gave him away. It may have been the Thackeray, the need to work serially and keep his audience in suspense. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Unabomber seemed to need to make it clear that those guys were amateurs and he was the pro. Somehow he needed to bring himself back onstage, to get credit for his masterpieces, and for his ability to elude a manhunt for so long. Seventeen years, and he hadn't been caught. Within five days, another deadly package was in the mail, this...
...basis--besides, of course, the spectacle of a beloved celebrity on trial for murdering his wife in an unusually gruesome fashion--was the underlying portrait it painted of a particular time and place. Here was precisely the kind of teeming social canvas that the likes of Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, Eliot and Flaubert used to such great effect. We met earthy Salvadoran maids, beadle-like cops, bumbling civil servants, stalwart limo drivers, beaten-down screenwriters manquas and, of course, comically obsequious houseguests. Occupying the top of the social pecking order in this modern-day Middlemarch was the defendant himself, living...
...lowbrow stuff, in which blacks tended to get the roles played by the fiddling boors and carousing peasants in Dutch genre. They become lazy Sambos with watermelons, fiddling clowns, butts of practical jokes. But not all the time. "Sambo is not my man and brother," snorted William Makepeace Thackeray during his lecture tour of America in 1852-53. Yet when his secretary, Eyre Crowe, painted a group of black women and a field hand waiting to be auctioned in Virginia, the image was all sympathy and respect, without a trace of his employer's bigotry...
...Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (1987). This vivid portrait of fear and loathing in New York City, circa now, is hilarious, unsparing and eerily premonitory, especially about Wall Street jitters and deteriorating race relations. The author is carrying on the panoramic tradition of Dickens and Thackeray but with updated social material. A better decade might have spawned a more comforting novel...