Word: subjects
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...idea was a backlash of the Atari and Intellivision craze, which before dying a couple of years ago, engulfed now-college students to the point where talk of "Adventure" and "Breakout" was a more dominant subject of conversation than anything else...
...point, Ashbery compared Beddoes with the British poet John Clare, the subject of his first Norton lecture, saying that both poets vanished after their works were completed, and both died tragically after leading hard lives...
...Iacocca, jolted the publishing world by selling 2.7 million copies. He followed that up with best sellers on Tip O'Neill and Sydney Biddle Barrows, the deb-styled Mayflower Madam. Paid a paltry $80,000 for the Iacocca book (which made $10 million to $15 million for its subject), Novak has since been rewarded with a much healthier cut of the profits he helps generate. For My Turn, he received a six-figure advance plus a percentage of the royalties...
Novak is able to elicit such responses because he is a most unassuming, amiable sort who leaves his ego at the door. He fits his approach to his subject. With the brusque, no-nonsense Iacocca, he conducted interviews in offices and conference rooms, never sharing a meal with him. With O'Neill, he took drives around Cape Cod in the former Speaker's beat-up Chrysler and listened to endless anecdotes over tuna sandwiches. "I worried that these were only a wall of stories," he says. "I came to realize that Tip's opinions were expressed through his stories...
After doing exhaustive library research on a subject, Novak typically talks to dozens of family members and friends to build up lists of questions for his interviews. No muckraker, he uses challenging or contradictory material only to try to jog his subject's memory or trigger fresh stories. "I push as far as I can go," he says. "I'm not trying to change a person's version of himself." Novak works from transcriptions of his interviews, occasionally going back to the tapes to capture the subject's voice -- one of his strengths, he believes. A couple of months into...