Word: ward
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...years ago, Richard Daley was re-elected to his fifth term with 79% of the vote. His annual budgets are routinely passed with only token opposition. He controls public housing, public schools and the city council. He is cozy with Big Business, is a master at the ward politics of fixing streetlights, and he speaks with a blunt, blue-collar brio that Chicagoans find endearing. "There's never been a [U.S.] mayor, including his dad, who had this much power," says Paul Green, professor of policy studies at Chicago's Roosevelt University. And he's used it to steer...
There you have a capsule description of Becker, the tangle-footed teenager whose room is often a mess, who forgets to carry money in his pocket and who boogies through life to rock tunes pumped directly brain ward by his stereo headset. His was a Wimbledon of tie breakers, comebacks and an injured ankle, all blithely handled. In the finals, it was Kevin Curren, a decade Becker's senior, who was a bundle of nerves as his percentage of successful first serves (47%) proved. He also seemed befuddled by an opponent who could go all out for everything because...
...Geoffrey Ward, former editor of American Heritage, is the latest of many to explore those thickets. He does so by returning to F.D.R.'s origins. The Roosevelts, it turns out, were a strange and sometimes bizarre family, and their history illuminates many of F.D.R.'s foibles. The future President's father James was widower of 52 when he suddenly proposed marriage to the equally lofty Sara Delano, age 26. The reason the Delanos were so privileged was that Sara's father was one of those 19th century entrepreneurs who had made a fortune smuggling Turkish opium into China...
...Ward soberly records these efforts to turn Roosevelt into a model boy, waiting for the explosion that never comes. F.D.R. turns into a complaisant youth, somewhat spoiled but eager to please. Schooling at Groton does not greatly change him, and neither does Harvard. When he is Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he claims that his failure to get into Harvard's Porcellian Club 15 years earlier was "the greatest disappointment of my life...
...Ward writes smoothly and pleasantly about all these eccentrics. Even so, his young hero remains a remote, undeveloped figure. It might be argued that anyone who thought his failure to make the Porcellian Club was the greatest disappointment of his life had not led a very interesting life. The fact is that at the time of Roosevelt's marriage, when Ward's book ends, F.D.R. had not yet become F.D.R. It was only his later struggle with polio that added the necessary steel to his character. Ward is already at work on sequel. It cannot fail to reveal a stranger...