Word: whats
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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In the normal political life of a democracy, laws and institutions are what count. Even a leader as forceful and as long in office as Margaret Thatcher can suddenly leave, and while the world certainly notices, the event doesn't constitute a national, much less an international crisis.
But these days there is nothing normal about Soviet politics. In a way, there never has been. In the bad old days of Stalinism and stagnation, the personality of the leader mattered so much because he stood at the top of a hierarchical system -- and at the center of a...
Now the familiar edifices of the U.S.S.R. have crumbled; the center cannot hold. Yet paradoxically the leader matters more than ever. Now, in the absence of all those ugly but unifying structures and attitudes (particularly that of fear), he often seems to speak for all that is left of a...
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. Devotees waited 17 years for the author to outdo his apocalyptic Gravity's Rainbow (1973). What they got instead was a kinder, gentler Pynchon. This saga of wilting '60s flower children, circa 1984, on the lam from federal narcs, displays much of the author's old...
Means of Ascent by Robert A. Caro. The second installment of what promises to be the longest and liveliest American political biography of modern times finds Lyndon Johnson transforming what were certainly not his finest hours into tarnished triumphs. To wit: avoiding World War II combat for as long as...