Word: 80s
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Since Mayer's last outing, a robust greenback has grown anemic, the U.S. has become the world's largest debtor, and the stock market dropped more than 500 points in one day, symbolically if not literally ending the avaricious '80s. Mayer patiently brings the reader up to speed on the intricacies of trading stocks, bonds, commodities and imaginative financial instruments with names like STRIPS, zero-coupon bonds and "Heaven & Hell" warrants...
School briefs are enlivened and focused with anecdotes and sage quotes from jaded codgers. What former New York Stock Exchange Chairman Bernard J. ("Bunny") Lasker said just before the bull market of the mid-'70s would be true enough in the '80s: "I can feel it coming, SEC or not, a whole new round of disastrous speculation, with all the familiar stages in order -- blue-chip boom, then a fad for secondary issues, then an over-the-counter play, then another garbage market in new issues, and finally the inevitable crash...
...Band Played On (1987), a survey of the medical, political and social impact of AIDS. Holleran and Monette stand waist-deep in the wreckage of homosexual society, particularly that mayfly culture that soared during the '70s and plunged abruptly when the virus struck hard at the beginning of the '80s...
Broadway has long spoken in English accents, at first because audiences admired Britain's elegant actors and urbane playwrights, then because producers came to prefer works that had been pretested in London, where costs are cheaper and audiences perhaps more forgiving. In the early '80s, dramas by Tom Stoppard and Peter Shaffer dominated the Tony Awards for plays; while in the past few years, Trevor Nunn's staging and Andrew Lloyd Webber's melodies have provided the very definition of hit musicals. This year, though, a clog is developing in the transatlantic pipeline. While London offers the customary array...
This formalist geography lesson could not last, of course. In the '80s it came apart like wet Kleenex. America has no single culture, but cultures. And so it should, since diversity is better than monotony. In any case, many ethnic Americans are still exiles within the dominant, white matrix. One painter in this show, Martin Ramirez (1885-1960), epitomized the extreme fate of the Hispanic as outsider. A migrant railroad worker from Mexico, Ramirez lost his powers of speech and became a catatonic schizophrenic in Los Angeles in 1915, was committed in 1930 and spent the last three decades...