Word: authorizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Africa (1985). Sydney Pollack's romantic adventure movie showed that Hollywood could still make 'em like it used to, with as much power and more subtlety. Meryl Streep had her most popular role as author Isak Dinesen, her restless heart liberated by the untamed beauty of Kenya...
...With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories by Saul Bellow (1984). Another American Nobel laureate presents his patented array of characters -- big thinkers and big shots -- with typical energy and verve. The author here makes limitations of length a positive virtue; the pressure of high-toned ideas passing through the minds of flawed, often comic figures gives the impression of short stories that are bursting at the seams...
...Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (1987). This vivid portrait of fear and loathing in New York City, circa now, is hilarious, unsparing and eerily premonitory, especially about Wall Street jitters and deteriorating race relations. The author is carrying on the panoramic tradition of Dickens and Thackeray but with updated social material. A better decade might have spawned a more comforting novel...
Poets in Their Youth by Eileen Simpson (1982). This would be a rarity in any era, a literary memoir free of rancor and score settling. The author recalls her first husband, John Berryman, and his friends, among them Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz, men who left behind some splendid poems and some sad histories of alcoholism, despair and suicide. But here they are young and joyful amid the possibilities of words, ignorant of the sadnesses that await them...