Word: though
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Five months after Lebanon's parliamentary elections, Prime Minister--designate Saad Hariri managed to form a unity government. Though the resolution to what had been a contentious political stalemate left Hariri's Western-backed coalition with the most ministerial posts, the opposing faction led by the Iranian-backed militia Hizballah--which the U.S. considers a terrorist organization--gained crucial Cabinet positions. The power-sharing agreement was welcomed by the U.N., but critics admonished Hariri for conceding to Hizballah's demands and potentially legitimizing its military presence in the country...
...pretty much taken care of that with the title alone. His suspenseful blameography reads like a thriller, even though we already know how things turned out. The Sellout traces the arc of Wall Street's ultimate blowup, from the risk-taking free-for-all that began in the late 1970s through the emergence of complex mortgage-backed securities (which Gasparino labels a "financial cancer") to angry laid-off Lehman Brothers employees packing up their desks a year...
After the firm imploded, friends of Fuld's worried not only about the spread of the financial disaster worldwide but also about his safety, as enraged employees, who had invested their life savings in now worthless company stock, cleared out. Though Wall Street, with government intervention, survived, Gasparino has plenty of finger-pointing to offer. He argues, for instance, that the SEC should be disbanded because of "the false sense of security it provides." Then again, after reading this book, you're not likely to be that susceptible anymore...
...trying to cobble together degrees at one school after another. In Sklenicka's book, Maryann emerges as an admirable if flawed anchor in her husband's life. Companion, breadwinner, fierce believer in Carver's genius, she was also a classic enabler who sank into alcoholism just as he did, though he sank deeper. Over the years, Carver and Maryann, with their two wary children in tow, would suffer just about every indignity that drunkenness confers, including his blackouts, her boozy flirtations, two bankruptcies and a holiday brawl at their place that knocked over the Christmas tree...
Also, by the late '70s, Carver and his wife had sobered up. When their brains cleared, the marriage dissolved, though not bitterly. You might say they had loved each other to a draw. Carver met and eventually married the poet Tess Gallagher, who would see him through his last, highly productive years before his death in 1988 from lung cancer. These are the years of his crowning achievement, Cathedral, a magnificent story collection with greater emotional range than his earlier published work. Lish edited that book too, but lightly. By then Carver was too big to be revised by anybody...