Word: tale
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Jacqueline Susann wanted to be famous. She had no talent and daunting burdens--an autistic child, breast cancer. But she had an iron will, an indefatigable publicist husband named Irving Mansfield and an unsuspected gift for salacious tale telling. The couple reinvented the art of book promotion while making best sellers of novels like Valley of the Dolls. This miscast, miscalculated movie (Bette Midler and Nathan Lane star) wants them to be inspiring, missing the obvious point, which is their potentially instructive monstrousness. The result is one of the worst messes in years...
...singing professionally. Soon, she's on the road. Fame and fortune come her way, either through struggle or windfall. So do men, who often treat her shabbily. There might be a season of drugs or insanity, or both. Still, musical success has arrived. It's a well-worn tale, but we never tire of hearing about these divas of our day. And the publishing industry is ever eager to oblige. Here are some new tomes about our finest songstresses...
Plato's lonely quest for the truth involves some tricky time traveling that takes him back to London during the Mouldwarp era. (Those familiar with Plato's Republic will note with interest that the destination of this journey is a vast cave.) The tales Plato tells on his return do not sit well with the governing authorities, and Plato meets a Socratic fate, put on trial for corrupting the young. By this point, Ackroyd's lively tale has shaded into an invigorating meditation on the changelessness, after no matter how many eons, of human nature and its uneasiness with...
...gist of the tale is that back in 1972, when Levin started his first job at what was then Time Inc., he worked in the company's cable-television division on 23rd Street in Manhattan. At the time, in those Pleistocene cable days, some genius had the idea of building a real-time TV news service that would allow Time Inc.'s cable subscribers to have direct access to the headlines, as opposed to having to wait for Huntley and Brinkley or Walter Cronkite or even, God forbid, the morning paper. To do this, Time Inc.'s wizards came...
...Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President (Random House; 422 pages; $25.95), New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin retells the whole tale with gusto and adds some fresh details. One example: a moist-eyed Clinton hails the Travelgate-embattled Hillary in his 1996 State of the Union Address as a "wonderful wife [and] magnificent mother"--and then autographs a copy of the speech as a gift for Monica Lewinsky. Toobin doesn't shy away from the story's tawdriest moments--like the Jones camp's suggestion that Clinton may have undergone surgery...