Word: wasps
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...Covenant the contractual terms are explicit. Examining the lives of selected Winthrops through our American history, the novel, comprised of nine short stories, considers the pact each family member strikes with the world. The quo of the covenant drawn up by Auchincloss concerns the prerogatives bestowed on every Yankee WASP family by birthright: social position, wholesome looks, refined sensibility, fair intelligence and money...
...work from a historical chronicle of a distinguished New England family to a pointed deposition--sketched on yellow legal paper--on the Puritan ethic. Through all his talk of covenants, missions and Puritan ideals runs an annoying smugness. Novelists John Marquand and John O'Hara also assayed the WASP upper crust in their writings, but rarely presumed to give their characters a moral or aesthetic superiority over the Great Unwashed. Auchincloss, on the other hand, hints that his Winthrops are not only different from you and me, they are better. By birth and from birth they remain arbiters of elegance...
...Watergate case slowly built, Redford noted two particularly interesting reporters among those plugging away at the story. When he read brief biographies of Woodward and Bernstein he was fascinated by the odd-couple quality of their pairing?a Wasp and a Jew, one cool and controlled, the other more voluble and volatile. Characteristically?he is a man much more interested in people than in ideas?"that was the first time I saw the potential film." He adds: "I remember thinking, 'This is very interesting, a study in opposing characters and how they work together.' I'm really fascinated...
Christmas is one of those times when the contents of the American melting pot break down, and all the WASP ingredients come bubbling up to the surface. Suddenly the whole country, except perhaps for certain parts of Brooklyn, turns into a huge Episcopalian Sunday School. When that great leveler, the Christmas spirit, begins to descend--usually about two weeks before Thanksgiving--you realize just how futile the separation of church and state really...
...Jewish kid growing up in a heavily WASP milieu, I always had a stormy love-hate relationship with Christmas. I had a passion for all the romantic trappings--the wreaths and the holly and the trees and the tinsel--but somehow I could never let myself go completely. When I was seven or so, I fixated on the idea of a tree, tall and green and smelling of pine forests. I nagged my mother about it so much that she finally went out and bought me something that was two feet high and silver and smelled of plastic. Somehow that...