Word: raconteur
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Australia, dying a pointless death in a hurricane. Rebecca, the idealist, ends up in a kibbutz, shattered and alone after her son is killed by a bomb in an Israeli café. Jan, the poet, remains in Czechoslovakia. Blacklisted into silence, he commits suicide. As a self-described "raconteur of cynical tales," Danny concludes that the only meaning to life is that there is no meaning. "History that repeats itself is a farce" becomes his fancy way of translating Huck Finn's cry from the heart: "I been there before...
...fact, the result-Travels with Charley-was a charming little book. Benson might well have made his strongest case for Steinbeck as a rambling raconteur, or as a superb short-story writer. 77?^ Red Pony and The Leader of the People live on as classics for the loving precision with which they portray a young boy's painful need to grow up and an old man's passion to recall his youth. If only Steinbeck, an innately modest man, had been more modest as a writer, he might not have been destined to whipsaw himself between the pretentious...
...films are argument enough for his place in movie history. With My Last Sigh, Buñuel allows himself to be seen in another light: as that most engaging of con artists, the raconteur. Reading the memoir is like spending a long, lazy afternoon in his presence. His voice never rises above a murmur. A small smile engages his face as he recalls some long-ago provocation that today scandalizes no one. Now and then he dozes. On one such afternoon this summer, Buñuel nodded off into immortality...
...this month, as the gruff but masterly chairman of the Senate's special committee to investigate Watergate charges and Richard Nixon, Sam Ervin, 86, described himself as "just an ole country lawyer." Since he retired to part-time private practice in Morganton, N.C., in 1974, the bushy-browed raconteur has also been a busy author. Humor of a Country Lawyer, his just-published anecdotal collection, covers everything from Ervin's circuit-riding attorney days to Watergate to the Social Security computer that paid him a lump-sum death benefit by mistake. He is troubled by arthritis, hypertension...
DIED. LeRoy Prinz, 88, movie choreographer who staged athletic, high-kicking dance routines in such classics as Yankee Doodle Dandy and South Pacific; in Hollywood. A renowned raconteur who often told of his youthful adventures as a soldier in the French Foreign Legion and as entertainment coordinator for Al Capone's nightclubs, Prinz once declared: "The public thinks that a dancing master is a flighty individual with a handkerchief in his sleeve and a set of taps on his shoes. I'd rather you called me Butch...