Word: splendid
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...remarkably competent human being. He programmed his pity for the poor. He was fierce. He could be rude. He shared the family conviction that the Kennedys, if not born, had at least been bred to rule. And he attracted the adulation and the rage which his clan, with their splendid, doomed lives, aroused in a nation that had never seen such a compelling collection of human beings, so beautiful, armored, and so vulnerable...
There are many splendid absurdities in Dan Wakefield's book, as well as horrors, ironies, incongruities, hypocrisies and examples of pathological normality. All were lovingly culled by Wakefield, a freelance journalist, during a four-month discovery tour of the state of the nation, or supernation, as he archly calls...
Pink Delights. As a result of an ambitious road-building program and a steadily expanding network of airfields, the archaeological digs of Yucatan, the baroque colonial Spanish cities and the splendid beaches are now only a few hours' drive or flight apart. Archaeological buffs, for instance, land in modern turboprops on the recently completed crushed-limestone runway beside the ruined temples of Chichen Itza. And in Mexico City (called simply Mexico by most Mexicans), workers labor round the clock, topping off new big-city hotels and readying the Olympic facilities...
Bark & Bite. Mailer indulges his hero with a splendid deadpan pomposity, reinforced by the fact that he refers to himself throughout in the third person. The reader first meets him in his Brook lyn Heights apartment, picking up a ringing telephone as if it were a pistol loaded for Russian Roulette. "On impulse, thereby sharpening his instinct as a gambler, he took spot plunges: once in a while he would pick up his own phone. On this morning in September, 1967, he lost his bet." The caller is a militant antiwar organizer and old Harvard classmate, who extracts from Mailer...
They were married after his junior year. He graduated summa cum laude in English, after turning in a thesis titled "Non-Horatian Elements in Robert Herrick's Imitations and Echoes of Horace." It was a splendid college career, but in retrospect, Updike feels that Harvard somehow sapped him of some vague, irreplaceable vitality. "I feel in some obscure way ashamed of the Harvard years. They were a betrayal of my high school years, really. Harvard, in exchange for a great deal of work, made me a civilized man. It's somehow painful...