Word: odysseus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...save his dying kingdom in Act III. Watching Steve Jobs hold his gorgeous new iBook triumphantly aloft before his assembled legions at last week's MacWorld convention in New York City, it was easy to imagine Apple Computer's interim-CEO-for-life perched somewhere in the pantheon between Odysseus and Simba the Lion King...
Heroes are known for that sort of Delphic distance; they usually play the outfield. Ancient ones (Odysseus) performed deeds of strength and cunning; medieval ones (Robin Hood) were honorable and loyal; modern heroes (Martin Luther King Jr.) triumphed in conflict. DiMaggio was all three, with two elements added: he knew that his heroism bore a public responsibility; thus his famous answer to the question of why he continued to play hurt: "Because there might be someone who hasn't seen me play...
...Cold Mountain (Atlantic Monthly Press) Imagine Odysseus walking through the blue mountains of North Carolina in the ghostly half-light at the end of the Civil War. Charles Frazier's miraculous (and best-selling) first novel is as spare as timeless myth, one man's yearning homeward. Yet its deeply local details, its twiggy smell of roots and solitary eccentrics, evoke the spirit of Thoreau--and the Taoist hermits who once haunted the Cold Mountains of old China...
HOMER The ancients rule! Wandering Odysseus may finally find Nielsen heaven with TV mini-series...
...what seems like an effort to compensate for the fact their star isn't, say, Daniel Day-Lewis, the creators of The Odyssey limn an even more brooding, contemplative hero than exists in Homer's epic. The original Odysseus is a heavyweight to be sure, but he is also a fast-talking, spirited wheeler-dealer, famous for his cunning. The creators might have had fun with that aspect of his character. Instead, they have conjured up a guy who seems to be on a very long journey to find his missing Prozac, even when he is rolling around...