Word: class
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with. In front of the camera, he was on his own. Behind it, he would be led by two Viet Nam vets, Stone and Kovic. "I chose Tom," Stone says, % "because he was the closest to Ron Kovic in spirit. I sensed that they came from the same working-class Catholic background and had a similarly troubled family history. They certainly had the same drive, the same hunger to achieve, to be the best, to prove something. Like Ron too, Tom is wound real tight. And what's wrong with that...
...Brother Abel (1985). The Snows of Yesteryear looks back before their time frame, to the childhood and, implicitly, the formation of a writer. It leads into a world now irretrievably lost, its values blown away by World War I and its fortunes wrecked by the inflationary '20s -- "For the class to which my parents belonged . . . a fall into chaos, into impotence and deprivation...
Strong material, then; and Rezzori follows this family labyrinth back with a fine disdain for sentiment, a transparency of feeling, an acid sense of humor and a vigilant eye for nuances of love and indifference, language, landscape and class behavior. It is not a young man's (or a moralist's) book. But it is intensely moving and contains, in its winding and ironic cadences, not a slack sentence: a performance in a difficult key about the making of a near extinct kind of European...
...they haven't done so. Despite a $585 million high-tech makeover for the Postal Service over the past two years, the odds have not improved that a letter will get from Boston to Miami in less time than the sender could drive it there. Performance on first-class mail delivery was at a five-year low in 1988, and complaints about late mail rose 35% last summer. For the workers, automation, heavier mail loads (especially during the Christmas rush) and outside competition have turned a once cushy job into a form of boot camp in eight-hour shifts...
...declared Moisi, should be able to discern -- by the body language of the Volkspolizei on the Eastern side and the Berlin police on the Western side -- an extraordinary and palpable tug of togetherness. "The citizens of the German Democratic Republic really have a feeling of humiliation about being second-class citizens ((compared with their Western counterparts)), and that feeling can be ameliorated only by reunification." Opposing that process, suggested Moisi, would ultimately cause more problems than it would solve...