Word: self
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Persuading capable lawyers to go along on so lengthy a legal journey-an "exhausting, self-lacerating investment of time and energy," as the A.C.L.U.'S Henry Schwarzschild describes it-is no easy task. "It's so desperate you take whom you can get," explains Morris. Indeed, the shortage of qualified attorneys threatens to overwhelm Morris and others like her because the nation's death row population, now totaling some 570, is climbing by almost 100 people a year.* Eighty percent of the prisoners mark their time in the states of the Old Confederacy; Georgia has the largest...
Elam Davies, 63. Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. In a time of laid-back preaching, Davies is a successful anachronism: a consummate, self-conscious and often florid dramatist of the pulpit. A transplanted Welshman with volatile eyebrows and a powerful Thespian gift, he is not a large man, but he fills the brooding gothic gloom of the Near North Side church with his resounding voice, as the late Dylan Thomas might if he were reading Yeats, or Richard Burton would if playing Hamlet. Like the poet Thomas, Davies grew up in Swansea, Wales. He claims that Burton patterned his style...
...force the pieces, he warned himself. Store them away. Patience. But how to be patient when he had so little time? ... All his professional life, it seemed to Smiley, he had listened to similar verbal antics signalling supposedly great changes in Whitehall doctrine; signalling restraint, self-denial, always another reason for doing nothing. He had watched Whitehall's skirts go up, and come down again, her belts being tightened, loosened, tightened. He had been the witness, or victim-or even reluctant prophet-of such spurious cults as lateralism, parallelism, separatism, operational devolution, and now, if he remembered Lacon...
...knows, as most chroniclers of Me Decade shenanigans do not, that private acts have public consequences; in the great tradition of British novelists, he draws society as a delicate, vast spider web, tuned to vibrate at the lightest footfall or breath of scandal. In addition, Read is a self-described "serious Catholic" and scales this novel to dimensions familiar to readers of Graham Greene: his hero's quest for fulfillment progresses not only as an item of gossip but as a spectacle under the cold eye of eternity...
...Conservative government locked in strikes and threats, Strickland becomes active in Labor Party politics, on the side all his well-to-do friends detest. He thinks he is rekindling the socialist torch he carried when young, but his wife Clare scalds him: "You're addicted to your own self-importance and like a real junkie you need bigger and bigger doses to keep going." Strickland also becomes embroiled in an affair with an enormously rich young woman and realizes, belatedly, that she thinks he will break up his home for her. He argues to himself that her impression never...