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I first heard of John Bear in 1990, when a man from Michigan named Bob Adams told me about the Ethiopian ear-pickers. In 1966, Southern Methodist University gave Bob Hope an honorary doctorate after the entertainer gave it a substantial donation. Up at Michigan State University, John Bear, earning his doctorate the hard way, resented this. He founded the Millard Fillmore Institute to honor In Roscoe, William Kennedy continues working the vein prospected by two minor classics, William Riordan’s Plunkett of Tammany Hall and Edwin O’Brien’s The Last Hurrah. The seventh Kennedy novel set in the author’s hometown of Albany, New York, is elegantly crafted, often uproariously funny, and betrays both a profound understanding of human frailty born of original sin and the sure knowledge that man born of woman is doomed to sorrow. His characters, of course, enjoy themselves as best they can, usually at each other’s expense. Thus, one of Roscoe’s numerous memorable minor characters, Mac, one of the cops who assassinated Legs Diamond The rushed decisions are the worst. Imagine being a politician: not an orator or a legislator, but an administrator, one who governs, daily responsible for implementing policies devised by others. Imagine constantly making decisions with incomplete understanding and insufficient knowledge and not enough time to fill either gap; living with the paranoia—after all, does not the word bear translation as “higher knowledge”—that nearly everyone around you has a hidden agenda and plays you for a sucker…. |
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