Word: wente
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Ross Perot had it half right; he wanted to fix American politics but chickened out, sacrificing his credibility for a protectionism that went out of style and for love of his own ego. The better half of Perot's posse spawned Jesse Ventura; the failed half degraded into the acid populism that is the stock-in-trade of Pat Buchanan. It plays well in iconoclastic New Hampshire, and with farmers and union men, but if a party aspires to one day leave the fringe in the cause of reform, it is a poison pill. Buchanan is no reformer...
...this arrangement will change almost immediately because the story keeps on developing. Last Wednesday Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic Press; 435 pages; $19.95) finally went on sale in the U.S., exactly two months after its publication in Britain. Those U.S. readers who had not managed to obtain a copy of the British edition, chiefly through Internet orders, swamped bookstores nationwide. From El Centro, Calif., to Littleton, N.H., many stores opened for business at 12 a.m.; others offered customers tea and crumpets or steep initial discounts. Barbara Babbit Kaufman, president and founder of the Chapter...
...adults when, during a 1990 train ride, "Harry Potter strolled into my head fully formed." For the next five years Rowling worked on Book One and plotted out the whole series, which will consist of seven novels, one for each year Harry spends at Hogwarts. "Those five years really went into creating a whole world. I know far more than the reader will ever need to know about ridiculous details...
...farm plowed by a team of Percheron draft horses. School was his parents' kitchen, his neighbors' fields. Town was a country crossroads with two stores, and entertainment a new book from the library. And though the young man with the Old Testament name and the Mark Twain upbringing later went on to study at Harvard and Yale, mixing with the privileged and the trend-conscious, his heart remained in the hills, beneath the oaks...
...provoked heavy return fire from the chattering classes it draws a bead on. A long review in Harper's magazine, facetiously titled Thus Spoke Jedediah and reeking of the quippy, jaded wit that Purdy fears the nation is mired in, opened by poking fun at Purdy's past and went on to brand him--ironically, of course--a "young sage," dismissing his ideas as "second- and third-hand musings." The New York Observer, a metropolitan weekly that is to the disaffected Eastern elite what the Daily Racing Form is to gambling addicts, found Purdy just as cloying and irritating. Among...