Word: romanized
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Rudenstine's family background is unusual for a Harvard president, most of whom have been of Northern European, Protestant origin. His father, who was Jewish, emigrated from Russia, and his mother is an Italian-American Roman Catholic...
This oddly lifeless gossip novel by Michael Korda, a publishing exec whose works include the yuppie missals Success! and Power!, is the sort called a roman a clef by the French and "serving up something for the shopgirls" by the English. There is a patronizing quality to the central notion, which is that the reader is a lowbrow who will have naughty fun -- "coo, oi didn't know that about 'er" -- guessing which real-life celebrities are behaving scandalously behind aliases and sketchy disguises...
...have thought of the line that General George Patton (the real Patton's words, spoken by George C. Scott) uttered at the end of the movie, after Patton's dazzling tank dash across Belgium and Germany to defeat Hitler's armies in 1945: "For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph, a tumultuous parade . . . The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot . . . A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning that all glory is fleeting." One imagines that if there had been...
None of that, however, can detract from the awesome speed, power and totality of the allies' military victory. The war, particularly its climactic 100-hour campaign, bids fair to be enshrined in military textbooks for as long as the annihilation of a Roman army by Hannibal at the battle of Cannae in 216 B.C. That is still a model for a strategy of encirclement, like the one followed by General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the allied commander in the gulf...
...Danny Smiricky -- also the hero of Skvorecky's critically praised The Engineer of Human Souls (1984) -- who habitually casts a jaundiced eye on the weird world of his birthright: a subjugated land where peasants bump elbows with intellectuals and the new dogma of communism has declared war on old Roman Catholic beliefs. Consigned in 1948 to teach the wisdom of Stalin at a vocational school in the rural Czechoslovak village of Hronov, Danny fights off a venereal disease contracted earlier and, rather unsuccessfully, the temptations of his female students. While he attends Mass with Vixi, one of the more importunate...