Word: american
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...last two Ripley novels are slack, ungainly; Ripley is more prey than predator. But the first three (recently issued in a hardcover omnibus by Knopf/Everyman's Library) have the tone of high, dark comedy. Tom kills--Dickie, Dickie's pal Freddie Miles, an American art lover, a bunch of mafiosi--as much for the game of eluding capture as for motives of profit or survival. In Ripley's Game he gets an ailing man involved in a murder plot only because the man once spoke abruptly to Tom. Then, when the man desperately tries to kill a Mafia goon...
...Paul Gray's review of historian Susan Dunn's Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light [BOOKS, Dec. 6]: as a Frenchman living in the U.S., I have had the opportunity to reflect on the respective merits and shortcomings of the two countries' revolutions. Dunn does not render sufficient justice to the particular challenges of the French Revolution. While the Reign of Terror was a sad phase in French history, it would probably have been difficult to avoid. The lessons drawn about the later emergence of Napoleon can also be considered from two perspectives: while some consider it an end point...
...Hollywood these days, a spectacle is what some randy star makes of himself at 3 a.m. on Sunset Boulevard. American movies have lost the love of grandeur, of finding the heroic scale of historical figures. Chen Kaige to the rescue! China's longest-reigning angry young filmmaker has an eye for rapturous compositions on a huge and telling tapestry. His new film mixes DeMille and Dostoyevsky: the cast-of-thousands splendor of a biblical epic and the gnarled psychology of Chen's own Farewell My Concubine. And all in less time than a Stephen King prison drama...
...American Speeches of the 20th Century chosen by 137 public-speaking experts: "Checkers" speech nabs No. 6 spot, beating out Reagan's Challenger eulogy and Malcolm X's "Ballot or the Bullet...
...Number of times the Righteous Brothers' You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' has been played on American radio and television, making it the most played song of the century...