Word: vineyard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Aboard the night ferry to Martha's Vineyard, a strange voice called out to World Bank President Robert S. McNamara that a phone call awaited him in the wheelhouse. As the former Defense Secretary started up the ladder, a young man attacked him and tried to throw him overboard. At 56, McNamara is still a strenuous New Frontier-era skiing and mountain-climbing enthusiast; he easily beat off the younger man, whose agility appeared somewhat addled by wine. The unidentified attacker was then restrained by friends. Why the attack? Apparently McNamara has dismayed the Vineyard's community...
Keneally's narrative has the short, brutal rhythm of the ax, each stroke glinting with images of hallucinatory brilliance (in a flash of revulsion against his aboriginal brethren, Jimmie imagines "a vineyard of gallows from which hung all the inept, unfortunate race, emphatically asleep"). Occasionally, Keneally overheats his language, invoking the pull of blood and the core of blackness in a way that recalls D.H. Lawrence in a rant. But most of the time the novel's intensity arises naturally from the dualities that throb at its center -black and white, crime and punishment, civilization and savagery...
...winds for tomorrow's sailing, or the prospects confronting George McGovern, or the latest gossip about who misbehaved after too many vodkas and tonic. But sooner or later, among the gatherings of the well-to-do and fashionable on the Massachusetts resort islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket,* the talk is likely to turn into bitter arguments over this summer's No. 1 question: Should the Federal Government move in and take charge of preserving the islands...
...says Henry Beetle Hough, venerable editor of the Vineyard Gazette. "The bill would give us protection at last by curbing the speculation and the development...
...sale of land has been correspondingly frenetic. Virtually any half-acre building lot now costs at least $5,000, and three acres on Chappaquiddick recently went for a price of $125,000. Some projects on the Vineyard, where building permits are filed at the rate of one a day, would carve old farms into quarter-acre lots; others include the island's first beachfront condominiums and its first trailer camp. On Nantucket, now dotted with about 3,000 gray-shingle houses, 1,884 house lots were being planned for development this spring. Besides creating an almost suburban clutter...