Word: yarn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This down-to-earth Piedmontese, it is readily apparent, defines himself exclusively by his work. The projects he describes are all outsize and difficult. "They never find oil in great places, say at San Remo or on the Costa Brava," is the way he begins a yarn about an offshore drilling rig in Alaska. The 250-meter tower was constructed horizontally on land, then towed out through cold, leaden seas and righted on site by flooding chambers at the base. On paper the task seemed simple; in practice it required judgment, skill and luck that almost defy imagination. Some Third...
...began, "The U.S. and Libya are on a collision course again, and the Reagan Administration is preparing to teach the mercurial Libyan leader another lesson." White House Spokesman Larry Speakes described the report as "unauthorized but highly authoritative." That was enough to send U.S. news organizations scrambling after a yarn that promised to involve terrorist plots and possible U.S. retaliation...
...onto the national radar screen with his 1984 novel, The Hunt for Red October, a tale of a defecting Soviet nuclear submarine and its conflicted crew. Published by the Naval Institute Press, known primarily for academic and technical journals, the book was praised by Ronald Reagan as "the perfect yarn," became the sleeper of the year and stayed on the best-seller lists for seven months. With his new novel, Clancy has climbed out of the water. This time his subject is nothing less than World...
...their success achieves exemplary status, could influence the immediate future of the movies. It is the restoration of something like an adult sensibility to the action movie, a belief, shared by such classicists of the genre as John Ford and Howard Hawks, that besides telling a rattling good yarn at a nerve-busting pace, pictures of this kind can carry a theme, even -- shocking word these days -- a moral...
...When the author's first novel, A Short History of a Small Place, appeared last year, reviewers guessed at such august influences as Twain and Faulkner. This time out, a case might be made for episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies. Pearson's parody of high-flown, old- fashioned Southern yarn spinning sounds a little too much like the minister presiding at the funeral of Jeeter, "who had a way with words if sheer bulk and volume counted for anything...