Word: wagners
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Many people have plans sitting on a shelf. New Orleans had two exercises, and they identified the problems," says Billy Wagner, a New Orleans native who is in his 25th season as senior director for emergency management for the Florida Keys. "We do these exercises, and we don't follow through on them. We just don't have the money...
...Thomas Berger's Being Invisible cannot seem to invent an identity for himself on paper or in person; when he uses his invisibility, clumsily, to filch $2,200 from the cash drawer of a bank, he is so conscience-stricken that he returns the money before closing time. Fred Wagner, a copywriter for a mail-order catalog and a would-be novelist, is the sort of wimp whose wife of four years would leave him out of "contempt for his habitual failure to claim justice from the petty tyrants of quotidian life." One day he discovers that he can simply...
...short, Wagner's invisibility, far from making him conspicuous, merely corroborates the fact that "he was already, and had been long since, invisible in the moral sense." When he decides to reveal his power to others, he has just as much trouble getting them to believe in his unseen self as in his presence. "I'm sorry, Fred," says his bored doctor after Wagner has disappeared and reappeared before the man's eyes, "we just don't have time for any more shenanigans." Berger's sly theme: invisibility is almost beside the point. Character, not circumstance, is Wagner's dilemma...
...sympathetic women -- a pleasant fate but an improbable one. This is particularly disappointing in Being Invisible, if only because the book raises higher expectations than the straightforwardly commercial Memoirs. Berger has qualities that Saint as yet lacks, including a distinctive prose style and a disciplined, selective eye. His antihero Wagner, seeking somebody else's faith to validate his existence, at least conveys a sense that something more is at stake than a big movie sale. Saint's Halloway remains a see-through personality, dismissed even by his yuppie former friends as "never much on belief of any sort." With...
...longer oil prices continue to climb, the greater the inflationary pressures will become. Rodrigo de Rato, the IMF's managing director, said last week that if high oil prices persist, "the impact on Asian growth will be considerable." Degussa's Wagner also warns that his forecast of continued profit growth depends on the stabilizing of raw-material prices. "There's tremendous uncertainty," says Deutsche Bank's Wall. For the moment, though, Europe's business executives, policymakers and central bankers are sitting tight, hoping their luck isn't about to change...