Word: classing
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...peak of the social hierarchy is an elite, known as the nachalstvo (roughly, the Establishment), which includes perhaps a million people. This privileged group consists of a ruling class -those wielding power in state, party and military circles-and an upper class, comprising party-favored intellectuals, artists and top athletes. Whether they enter this exclusive club via the committee room, the Bolshoi stage or the hockey rink, members of the nachalstvo are assured of hidden perks denied to ordinary citizens...
...those who aspire to political power, membership in the Communist Party is a must. But the party card alone is no guarantee of success: few of the party's 16.5 million members ever make it into the elite class, just as many privileged citizens in the scientific and cultural fields never join the party. Moreover, party responsibilities are demanding and promotions are slow in coming, since top officials tend to remain at their posts into their 70s or 80s. In general, the aspiring apparatchik must rely on patience, hard work and diligence, plus a certain Dale Carnegie-like skill...
...boxer and oldtime bootlegger who helped the Colucci family collect gambling debts and gave unorthodox religious instructions to his son: "There are ten commandments. Right? Well, it's like an exam. I mean, you get eight out of ten, you're just about top of the class." Mother Shapiro is a former stripper and late-blooming porno actress who pops the eyes of Joshua's adolescent friends with a fan dance at her son's bar mitzvah...
About halfway through this collection of ten short stories and a novella, a Class C minor league baseball player named Rick Stanley hits a home run: "It would happen again, in other ball parks, in other seasons; and if Stanley had been able to cause it instead of having it happen to him, he would be in the major leagues." Author Andre Dubus, 43, specializes in such people, interested but hapless spectators of their own lives. Although many of his characters are physically rooted in New England mill towns, they walk the streets as moral transients. "Should and shouldn...
...world record for overland flight. Another, more esoteric record was achieved in April by Jerry Dietrick, 56, of Florence, Ky., who became the first pilot to fly solo from Cincinnati to London to Munich in a single-engine plane of the 3,850-lb. to 6,414-lb. class...