Word: reader
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...Sassari (pop. 100,000), where Berlinguer grew up, one of his teachers recalls that "he was a very mediocre student, but he had a good mind." The young Enrico was a voracious reader who spent much time in his Uncle Ettorino's library; it was there that, among other things, he discovered Karl Marx. His family also had a radical tradition; the Berlinguers, like many other Sardinian landowners, had been squeezed by industrialization and became ardent progressives as a result. Continuing the tradition, Enrico and Younger Brother Giovanni, now 51 and a Communist Deputy, haunted a Sassari cafe favored...
...White House, and in about 6 million other households-more than any issue of TIME ever published. It seemed appropriate, then, that as soon as TIME'S second Bicentennial issue, The New Nation, was completed, a special edition be given to the country's second highest ranking reader, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. As it turned out, the Vice President had just finished serving as a bicentenary tour guide, having escorted French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing through the Revolutionary War battle site at Yorktown. Mr. Rockefeller did not say whether President Giscard seemed unusually well informed about...
...dessert is austere "melon and cookies"; the G Street Club offers "a perfect, soft Brie"). But his prose, often better than serviceable, is sometimes very cutting indeed. (The political career of a Democratic Vice President is summed up as "a lackluster, snail creep to seniority.") By the time the reader gets to President No. 3, Richard Monckton, he is meant to accept Ehrlichman's jungle view of life in the nation's capital. U.S. Presidents generally, one is encouraged to assume, should be placed only a few points to the right of pit vipers on the lovability scale...
...familiar is some of the portraiture that the intrigued reader finds himself wondering which physical details Ehrlichman has changed to keep his fictional license legal. Did this leader of the free world, as he writes, often emerge from the lavatory to greet foreign dignitaries with a slightly damp hand shake? Nixon, like Monckton, scorned hat and gloves. Was it really to preserve a macho image or to copy John F. Kennedy? And what of Carl Tessler, guttural-voiced escapee from Vienna and Harvard who serves as Monckton's foreign policy expert and chief of the National Security Council...
This bald summary scants Commoner's enviable skill at explaining complicated technical issues in lucid and lively terms. The reader rides as easily on Commoner's prose as on one of his favorite electric trains. Then, suddenly, the author's destination looms up. He blames America's energy, environmental and economic troubles squarely on the baneful evolution of the once effective capitalistic system because it aims to emphasize "private profit rather than social value." The solution, "at least in principle," Commoner insists, is some form of socialism...