Word: wilkinson
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MIDNIGHTS by Alec Wilkinson...
...college graduate named Alec Wilkinson applied for a job with the police department of Wellfleet, Mass., a popular vacation retreat on Cape Cod. His main qualification for the post was a familiarity with the area; he had summered there regularly as a child, and his parents had since joined the 2,000 or so people who weathered Wellfleet all year long. On the other hand, he possessed a slight physique and no knowledge at all about law enforcement. He had majored in music at Bennington. "Music, Huh?" the chief said during the job interview. "That...
...meaner locale, such on-the-job training might have led to disaster. Happily, Wilkinson's experiences yielded up a good book instead. Midnights is both a comedy of errors and an affectionate portrait of small-town police, those beleaguered souls charged with the task of keeping their neighbors in line. During Wilkinson's inaugural night on the beat, his partner says: "The first six months were murder for me. After that, when I found out the people I thought were my friends weren't really my friends, I felt better...
Aside from suspicious or unruly natives, Wilkinson finds himself coping primarily with boredom. "By anyone's definition," he writes, Wellfleet is "a safe place to live." When one patrolman finds the town hall locked at night, he reports this fact as a "suspicious incident." The chief borrows the shotgun from a police cruiser when he goes hunting in Maine. During the only local bank heist in anyone's memory, the teller convinces the robber that his take ($300) is a lot of money to carry around in cash. The robber is obediently investing some...
Muammar Gaddafi is a dangerous man. The alleged plot to kill President Reagan and other top officials is perfectly consistent with Gaddafi's character. But to be fair, I must disagree with Aberdeen University Professor Paul Wilkinson's comment, which implied that Libya is the first sovereign nation since World War II to plot the assassination of a head of state. For better or for worse, it is well documented that the CIA attempted more than once during the 1960s to eliminate Cuba's Fidel Castro...