Word: woes
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...repudiated by the revisionism of the sedentary '80s. The interplay between Ronald Reagan and shifting cultural attitudes has created a new orthodoxy of patriotism and restraint: Viet Nam (a noble if tragic cause), drugs (just say no) and sex (play it safe). As the pendulum swings to the right, woe betide any baby-boom politician who spent the '60s doing anything more daring than swallowing goldfish and doing the Frug. Before the nation gives way to a new slogan, "Don't Trust Anyone Under 45," it is fitting to ask what are the appropriate standards by which to judge baby...
...they are often either provoking shards of dialogue (Put Yourself in My Shoes, They're Not Your Husband) or freighted single words (Fever, Fat, Careful). Most of these tales are culled from four previous books, with seven new entries. Of the latter, Elephant is a grimly funny catalog of woe from the soft touch in a remorseless family that lives on loans. None of the new material, however, has quite the impact of the best old stories. Feathers is a marvel, 18 pages that contain as many true surprises as a protracted piece of trickery by John Fowles. What...
Claudia's great intellectual preoccupation -- as well as the thesis of her historical volumes -- is the random nature of history. Woe to the person who sees any order in the past; kaleidoscope is Claudia's favorite word. Effective enough at first, this aspect of Moon Tiger is overdrawn and finally tedious. A similar strain shows in what are by now familiar literary musings about the ancient stones and mysterious fossils around Lyme Regis. It is possible that Dorset should be cordoned off to novelists for a decade...
...peculiarly powerful form of gravitas may arise out of suffering. It draws its authority not only from the redemptive example of Christ but also from Greek tragedy: the terrible moral power of woe. Mother Teresa has that gravitas of the redemptive. Whole cultures may be judged weighty or weightless by the calibration of suffering. Russian history sometimes seems an entire universe of gravitas: always there is the heavy Slavic woe, the encroaching dark and metaphysical winter...
...happened is a typical tale of oil-patch woe. When petroleum prices were high in the late 1970s, First City lent extensively to oil-rig builders and small supply firms. When prices later plunged, loan defaults skyrocketed. First City then boosted its presence in real estate loans -- and that market softened. As foreclosures mounted, First City's management offered Arabian horses, Porsches or 40-ft. yachts to new customers who maintained accounts of $100,000 and up. The gimmicks did not lure enough high rollers to stanch First City's losses, and talk of a takeover, bailout or shutdown mounted...