Word: wade
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...power failure fit right in with the pre-Halloween atmosphere, as did the nonfunctioning public address system and the several ceiling tiles above the Harvard Band that fell out of place. Add to that a spear by UNB's Wade Simpson on senior Steve Martins and a boxing exhibition provided by Dan Sherstenka on Harvard sophomore Joe Craigen (Craigen somehow got the same four minutes in penalties as Sherstenka), and one could say the game was a wee bit atypical...
Lake is mostly the story of John Wade, a boyish, idealistic politician who retreats to a cottage in the Minnesota woods to recover after a humiliating election defeat. There, with Kathy, his longtime wife and college sweetheart, he looks into the mist over the lake and plays hide-and-seek with his unwanted memories. For Wade is not only an earnest man of principles, he is also a spooked vet who wakes up yelling in his sleep recalling the horrors he was part of -- and party to -- in Vietnam. Kathy is guilty of her own betrayals, and the wary husband...
...tell friend from enemy, uncertain what they were fighting for. "The jungles stood dark and unyielding. The corpses gaped. The war itself was a mystery. Nobody knew what it was about, or why they were there, or who started it, or who was winning, or how it might end." Wade is an amateur magician nicknamed "Sorcerer" by his unit, and Vietnam becomes a place where he tries to make reality go away; it is a perfect training ground for the subterfuge and surveillance tricks people also use in love...
Expertly crosscut with Wade's life is a series of chapters called "Evidence" into which O'Brien throws psychological theories, passages of presidential biography, even accounts of battlefront atrocities in 1776. Here are quotations from Dostoyevsky and George Sand; selections from The Magician's Handbook and the Nuremberg Principles; an item about the 30,000 people who go missing every year. Thus, for example, as we travel deeper into Wade's battlefront memories, we are also given hard-and-fast, nonfiction testimony from the men who perpetrated the My Lai massacre. The "Evidence" chapters broaden the book's focus...
...what he does best, which is to find the boy scout in the foot soldier, and the foot soldier in every reader. No one writes better about the fear and homesickness of a boy adrift amid what he cannot understand, be it combat or love. O'Brien shows us Wade as a lonely, pudgy 10- year-old, practicing magic tricks before the mirror, hoping to conjure a callous father's love out of thin air. "The mirror made his father smile all the time. The mirror made the vodka bottles vanish from their hiding place in the garage...