Word: violent
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...been in continuous turmoil since Taraki came to power, in April 1978, following a coup in which former President Mohammed Daoud was gunned down in Arg Palace. Taraki's Marxist Khalq (masses) Party promptly launched a radical program of social reform and land redistribution. The policy met with violent resistance from the country's Islamic tribesmen, who make up some 85% of Afghanistan's 17 million people. Loyal to their old feudal leaders and enraged by the new, "godless" regime in Kabul, Muslim guerrillas launched a civil war that has kept the Soviet-backed Khalq government tottering...
...Taron and dozens of others were dead. On Sunday the Revolutionary Council announced that Taraki had resigned on "health grounds" and reassigned his posts to Amin. At week's end, the Kabul government still had not confirmed Taraki's death, but, considering Afghanistan's tradition of violent political change, it was hard to imagine that he was still alive...
...bitterness of the civil war was illustrated last March by violent riots in Herat, where Muslim peasants and 2,000 defecting Kabul troops went on a bloody rampage, killing hundreds of Khalq officials, army soldiers and foreigners, including at least 20 Soviet advisers and their families. Kabul responded with an all-out attack by helicopter gunships and jets, leaving some 20,000 Afghans dead in the streets. Though it crushed the riot, the massive retaliation reinforced the tribesmen's conviction that the Khalq regime is an atheistic puppet of the Soviet Union. Said one unrepentant factory business manager...
Passion Play is Kosinski's seventh novel and we see more method to the madness of human grotesquerie that has always decorated his pages. Kosinski writes about the dark shadow self--our violent urges, homosexual lusts, transexual curiosities, murderous inclinations, heterosexual explorations, and, inevitably, our intense fear of surrendering control of the flesh and bones that give us life. None of these themes is new to Kosinski; what's new is the lucidity and restraint with which they're developed. Passion Play is his best novel...
...work has seemed to move straight from printing press to college syllabus. Yet it has never been necessary to go to school to acquire a taste for Hawkes. At its best his writing is vividly accessible, and almost always disturbing. His recurrent subject is the eruption of some dark, violent passion into the turmoil of mental ife, and his prose strains not only to describe this event but to re-create it. Hawkes at peak intensity is the literary equivalent of delirium...