Word: excessive
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Manhattan's Morton Janklow, whose literary agency represents such hugely commercial writers as Sidney Sheldon and Jackie Collins. Janklow boasts that since 1981, when the Hearst Corp. bought the publishing house of William Morrow for $25 million, he has closed three deals with individual authors that were each in excess of that amount. Naturally, the agents are fanning the bidding frenzy. Says Evans: "It used to be you would see if there was substance to a book. Now if you say, 'I'd like to meet the person,' or 'Can we have a conversation?', some agents impatiently go to someone...
...students of 1966 were the Red Guards, and for nearly a decade their movement convulsed the country in chaos, violence and dictatorial excess. Millions of Chinese, including nearly everyone who enjoyed a privileged status, were sent to "re-education camps" in the countryside, where they underwent humiliating rituals of "self-criticism." Political leaders who had been trying to modernize China's economy were branded "capitalist roaders" and in many cases were read out of the party and power. In the name of glorifying the "masses" and "bombarding the bourgeois headquarters," libraries were ransacked, factories and schools closed, and the country...
That line from Mike Nichols' 1967 film, The Graduate, became a classic put- down of the Establishment, but 22 years later plastics are no joke. Mounds of plastic-foam cups and empty soda bottles clutter roadsides and choke waterways. Though the U.S. faces a staggering excess of all forms of solid waste, plastic refuse is especially onerous: all but invulnerable to deterioration, the debris can last for centuries. What's more, a mere 1% of all plastic waste is being recycled, in contrast to 25% of used aluminum...
Auchincloss tosses off small but fascinating insights into the life-styles of the rich and infamous. Grace Wilson Vanderbilt, the longtime doyenne of Manhattan society, had elaborate dinners for 40 guests served at near Burger King pace: eight courses in an hour. Despite their snobbishness and excess, Auchincloss notes, the Vanderbilts did live up to a code. They were true to their own, and, as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney indicated during the 1930s custody case involving her niece Gloria, they knew the difference between a lady and a tramp -- which is that the lady must conceal the tramp inside...
AMULETS AGAINST THE DRAGON FORCES. Paul Zindel's off-Broadway play about a self-destructive alcoholic and a neurotic but winsome adolescent is superbly played, and its melodramatic excess sings like pure truth...