1987

1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990

political events

Soviet Party Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev demands reforms January 27 and on June 25 announces plans for a new direction in economic policy. Moscow's vast central-planning system is braking the economy rather than stimulating it, he says. Beginning January 1, 1988, Soviet factories should have the chance to exercise local initiative and assume risks of failure. Moscow Communist Party chief Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, 56, has gained popularity by sacking corrupt officials but is ousted November 10 after complaining of the slow pace of Perestroika (reform); he is given a senior position in construction November 18 after criticism of his dismissal (but see 1989).

Recriminations over the "Iran-Contra" deal (selling weapons to Iran and using the funds to supply contra forces in Nicaragua) embroil U.S. cabinet officers (see 1986). The Tower report submitted January 29 by a Senate investigating committee charges that members of the administration deceived Congress and each other. CIA director William J. Casey resigns January 29 after 6 years in the job and dies of pneumonia and cancer at Glen Cove, N.Y., May 6 at age 74, leaving many touchy political questions unanswered and perhaps unanswerable. He is succeeded May 26 by St. Louis-born lawyer William H. (Hedgcock) Webster, 63, who has served as FBI director and will head the agency until August 1991. Oliver North testifies before a congressional committee in July that his secret operations had approval from higher-ups (Fawn Hall, his secretary, has admitted February 25 that she helped North revise and shred documents that might have implicated him in deals that involved using money from sales of arms to Iran for supplying Contra forces in Nicaragua. "Sometimes you just have to go above the law," she says, and testifies June 9 that she smuggled documents out of the office by concealing them under her clothing), John J. Poindexter testifies that he authorized use of profits from Iran arms sale to support the contras, Secretary of State George P. Shultz testifies that he was repeatedly deceived, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger testifies to official intrigue and deception, and President Reagan says August 12 that U.S. policy in the affair went astray. The final congressional committee report November 18 after 3 months of hearings charges Reagan with failing to obey the constitutional requirement that the president execute the laws. It documents distribution of nearly $48 million from arms sales to the contras and says the president bears "ultimate responsibility" for the wrongdoing of his aides.

Former U.S. Naval Investigative Service analyst Jonathan J. Pollard receives a sentence of life imprisonment March 4 for having spied for Israel (see 1986). Pollard's wife, Anne, receives a 5-year sentence as an accessory. Former nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu goes on trial for espionage and treason in August, a secret tribunal finds him guilty, and it will sentence him in March of next year to 18 years' imprisonment. He refuses to apologize for revealing information about Israel's nuclear-development program and will be held in solitary confinement at Ashkelon Prison for 11 years despite an international campaign for his release.

West German "flight hobbyist" Mathias Rust, 19, pilots a single-engined Cessna from Helsinki to Moscow May 28, covering 500 miles in broad daylight and circling the Kremlin three times before landing near Red Square. A Soviet official says Rust has turned "a great military power for the moment into a joke."

Some 25,000 demonstrators march in West Berlin June 11 to protest the visit of President Reagan, masked youths known as the "anonymous" throw projectiles at the police and break store windows, but Reagan gives a speech at the Brandenburg Gate June 12 denouncing the Soviet system ("we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health." "Even today the Soviet Union cannot feed itself") while supporting glasnost: "If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate . . . open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

Former Nazi party leader Rudolf Hess commits suicide at Berlin's Spandau Prison August 17 at age 93 (he is found unconscious in a small prison-yard cottage with an electrical cord around his neck).

German politician Uwe Barschel resigns as premier of Schleswig-Holstein September 25—12 days after his Christian Democrat Party has won election. His press aide Reiner Pfeiffer alleged the day before the election that Barschel had ordered a campaign of "dirty tricks" to discredit his Social Democratic Party (SPD) rival Bjorn Engholm, hiring detectives to pry into Engholm's sex life, writing an anonymous letter denouncing him as a tax evader, and writing in a pamphlet that the SPD approved of adults having sex with children as young as 14.

Britain's Conservative Party wins reelection June 11; Prime Minister Thatcher begins a third term.

Italian voters elect porn star Cicciolina (Ilona Staller), 34, to the nation's Parliament.

Party Secretary Gorbachev arrives at Washington December 7 for a 3-day summit conference on arms reduction (see 1986). He and President Reagan sign a treaty at the White House December 8 agreeing to eliminate medium-range intermediate nuclear weapons in both superpower arsenals; the first treaty to reduce the size of nuclear arsenals, it goes far beyond the "nuclear freeze" proposed by many in 1982 by agreeing to dismantle all Soviet and U.S. medium-and shorter-range missiles, with extensive weapons inspection on both sides. Western experts have inspected a heretofore top-secret radar site at Krasnoyarsk September 5 to see if it violated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as Reagan officials had said.

Czech Communist Party leader Gustav Husák resigns December 17 after 20 years in power. He is succeeded by economic specialist Milos Jakes, 65, who is urged by Soviet leader Gorbachev to promote Soviet-style perestroika (restructuring) and "democratization" (see 1989).

Syrian troops occupy West Beirut February 22, ending 3 years of anarchy during which terrorists, mainly pro-Iranian Shiites, have kidnapped dozens of foreigners, but Lebanon's prime minister Rashid Karami, 55, is assassinated June 1. Palestinians led by Sheik Ahmed Yassin, 50, organize the militant Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas (Harakat-al-Muqawima al-Islamiyya) in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with a mission to destroy Israel and create an Islamic state in Palestine. Hamas is also Arabic for zeal; members of the movement have worked since the late 1970s with the pan-Arab Muslim Brotherhood to create a network of charities, clinics, and schools in Gaza; and they have been active at universities. Religious factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization support Hamas (but the PLO will later break with it), and Hamas leaders begin to call for a jihad (holy war) against Israel. An Israeli army truck accidentally hits some Arab vans in the occupied Gaza Strip December 8, killing four people; rumors spread that the accident was a deliberate retaliation for the murder of an Israeli salesman. Militant young Palestinians begin throwing rocks at Israeli troops December 9, the troops shoot some protesters dead, and the violent intifada (Arabic for uprising) spreads throughout the occupied territories. Civil disobedience will cost more than 300 Arab lives in the next 12 months in a struggle to oust Israeli occupation forces and establish a separate Palestinian state (see 1988).

Kuwait asks for U.S. naval protection of her tankers against Iranian attacks in the Persian Gulf as the Iraq-Iran war continues. President Reagan complies, knowing that refusal would result in Kuwait asking Moscow, and a spasmodic "tanker war" begins in the Gulf. A Soviet vessel comes under attack for the first time May 8, Iraqi missiles hit the frigate U.S.S. Stark May 17 with a loss of 37 men, and Iraq's president Saddam Hussein apologizes.

Turkey holds a referendum September 6 that returns former prime minister Süleyman Demirel to power (see 1980). He launched a national campaign last year to initiate the referendum, wins election September 24 to the chairmanship of the True Path Party, and is reelected Isparta deputy in the general elections November 29 (see 1991).

China's Communist Party expels dissidents January 14.

South Korea's military dictator Chun Doo Hwan appoints Roh Toe Woo, 55, as his successor in June, students stage violent protests, Roh—and, later, Chun—agree to direct elections, opposition leader Kim Dae-jung is cleared of all outstanding charges, has his civil and political rights fully restored, and announces October 30 that he is forming a new political party, he and opposition leader Kim Young Sam are allowed to participate in the balloting, but the two Kims split the opposition vote, and Roh wins election December 16 with 36.6 percent of the popular vote in the first direct presidential election since Park Chung Hee came to power (see 1992).

India and Sri Lanka sign a treaty July 29 designed to end the Tamil Rebellion that has escalated since 1983; India sends troops into the island, they clash with Tamil forces in the north, and extreme Sinhalese nationalists commit acts of violence in the south. A bomb explosion at Colombo November 9 leaves 32 dead, more than 75 injured, and a top official of the ruling United Nationalist Party is assassinated in December (see 1988).

Tibetan demonstrators stone police to protest Chinese rule; the October 1 riots leave six dead, scores seriously injured. Beijing accuses the Dalai Lama of stirring up anti-Chinese feeling by "criminal" actions. The White House expresses support for Beijing October 6, but the U.S. Senate votes 98 to 0 to condemn the Chinese crackdown.

The Meech Lake Accord signed by Canada's provincial prime ministers outside Ottawa in April recognizes Quebec as a "distinct society" and makes special concessions to that province, but the accord requires ratification by all ten provincial legislatures by June 23, 1990 (see 1990). Quebec separatist René Levesque dies of a heart attack at Montreal November 1 at age 65.

The Dutch ambassador to Surinam leaves the country January 20 after being accused of interfering in Surinamese affairs, the foreign minister Hendrik Herrensberg offers his resignation February 10, and head of state Lt. Col. Desi Bouterse announces February 12 that his puppet premier Pretaapnarain Radhakishun no longer enjoys the support of the ruling military Supreme Council and has been asked to resign (see 1986). Three opposition leaders in the Supreme Council form a Front for Democracy and Development August 2. Bouterse signs an agreement with them 10 days later pledging to respect the results of an election if they maintain good relations with the army, Surinam's voters give overwhelming approval to a new constitution in a referendum held September 30, and the coalition leaders win a landslide victory at the polls November 25, with only 9 percent supporting Bouterse's newly formed National Democratic Party (see 1988).

Five Central American nations sign an accord August 7 at Guatemala City agreeing to cooperate with Costa Rica's president Oscar Arias Sánchez, 45, in finding ways to resolve conflicts in the region. Costa Rica has not had an army since 1948, Arias is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize October 13, but hostilities continue between Nicaragua's Sandanista government and U.S.-supported contras.

Zimbabwe's parliament suspends former prime minister Ian Smith for 1 year April 2 to punish him for a speech he made to white businessmen at Johannesburg in February urging them to fight the "blackmail" of international economic sanctions against South Africa; the Zimbabwean House of Assembly votes 78 to 0 August 21 to abolish the 20 seats reserved for whites since the country gained independence in 1980; antigovernment rebels in southeast Zimbabwe hack 16 members of a white Christian missionary group to death with axes on the night of November 26 (most of the victims are women and children); opposition leader Joshua Nkomo condemns the massacre, and he signs an agreement with Prime Minister Robert Mugabe at Harare December 31, ending a 5-year guerrilla war in Matabeleland. Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union and Mugabe's African National Union (Patriotic Front) join to create the ZANU (PF); Mugabe is sworn in as the nation's first executive president and the position of prime minister is abolished.

Zulu prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, 58, launches a bloody civil war against South Africa's African National Congress (ANC). Less militant against apartheid than the still-imprisoned Nelson Mandela, Buthelezi has opposed economic sanctions against Pretoria, favors capitalism, and has enlisted 1.7 million members, mostly Zulu, in Inkatha, which he founded in 1975 (see 1988).

Uganda's Holy Spirit Movement mounts an army of 6,000 men armed with sticks, stones, and voodoo toys who try to storm Kampala under the leadership of Acholi tribal priestess Alice Lakwena, 27, who dabs her followers with "magic" ointment and promises them that their stones will explode like grenades (see 1986). Government forces use machine guns and artillery to mow down thousands, inflicting the heaviest loss of life involving magic belief since the Maji-Maji insurrection of 1905. Kenyan border police arrest Lakwena in December as she tries to cross into their country (see Kony, 1989).

Burkina Faso's president Thomas Sankara is gunned down in his office at Ougadougou October 15 at age 37 (see 1984). Favoring agricultural workers and women over the urban civil service, he has organized mass campaigns to vaccinate peasants, teach them to read, and help them manage scarce water supplies. Sankara's best friend Col. Blaise Compaoré, 37, has killed him in a coup d'etat supported by Libya and will govern with far less progressive policies.

Tunisia's newly appointed prime minister Gen. Zine el Abidine Ben Ali declares President Bourguiba, now 84, too senile to continue his 30-year rule (a team of physicians has found him unfit), ousts him November 7, places him under guard in a villa outside Tunis, and takes over in a bloodless (but constitutionally legal) coup, promising democratic reforms. Bourguiba's enlightened policies (plus oil revenues) have brought Tunisia from the Middle Ages into the 20th century, but favoritism has combined with a rise in Islamic fundamentalism to bring the country to the brink of civil war.

Niger's dictator Seyni Kountche dies of a brain tumor at Paris November 10 at age 56 after a 13-year rule; he is succeeded by his chief of staff (and cousin), Col. Ali Saibou, 47, who promises democratic reforms (see 1989).

Newspaper reporters observe model Donna Rice, 27, going into the Washington, D.C., town house of 50-year-old Kansas-born Sen. Gary Hart (originally Hartpence) (D. Colo.) one night and not coming out until the next morning. A married man, presidential hopeful Hart has been photographed with Rice on a trip to Bimini aboard his friend's yacht Monkey Business; he bows out of the presidential race May 8, and although he reenters December 16 with support from his wife, Lee, the Donna Rice affair has blighted his chances.

Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor (ret.) dies of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) at Washington, D.C., April 19 at age 85; former presidential adviser Arthur H. Dean of pneumonia at his Glen Cove, N.Y., estate November 30 at age 89.

human rights, social justice

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling January 13 upholds the right to require leaves for pregnant women. The Court rules 6 to 3 March 25 that giving women and minorities job preference over better-qualified white males is not unconstitutional. The Court rules 7 to 0 May 4 that Rotary clubs must admit women.

South Africa acts April 11 to ban protests aimed at winning release for political detainees (see 1986). Black miners in South Africa return to the pits August 30 after a strike that has gained them nothing (see 1988). U.S. apartheid opponent Leon H. Sullivan abandons support of the principles he advanced 10 years ago as ethical guidelines for U.S. companies doing business in South Africa, citing frustration at that government's lack of progress in dealing with issues of racial and economic equality: "There is no greater moral issue in the world today than apartheid," he says.

A French court rules July 4 that Klaus Barbie was guilty of war crimes and sentences him to life imprisonment. Now 73, Barbie was Gestapo chief in Lyons from 1941 to 1945; he was arrested in Bolivia 4 years ago.

Civil rights activist Bayard Rustin dies of cardiac arrest following surgery for a ruptured appendix at New York August 24 at age 75.

Wappingers Falls, N.Y., schoolgirl Tawana Brawley, 15, is found November 28 half naked with "KKK" and "Nigger" smeared with dog feces on her body. She claims six white men, one of them wearing a police badge, kidnapped her November 24 and repeatedly raped her. Self-serving lawyers take up her case, inflaming the black media, but a grand jury investigation will show that Brawley left home for 4 days and staged her condition to avoid violent punishment from her stepfather.

exploration, colonization

The Soviet Union launches its Kvant 1 expansion module in April to hook up with the Mir space station that went into orbit 14 months ago; it carries astrophysics and life support equipment but is unable to dock until cosmonauts, in a space walk, remove a bag of garbage from the coupling mechanism (see 1989).

commerce

Brazil announces in February that she is suspending interest payments on loans from foreign banks. The action by the Third World's largest debtor nation signals a worsening debt crisis.

Burma's government decrees in March that 75-, 35-, and 25-kyat notes are now worthless and will be replaced by 90- and 45-kyat bills. Few Burmese keep money in banks; the voiding of the three highest-denomination banknotes wipes out many people's savings (see politics, 1988).

The U.S. trade deficit hits a record $16.5 billion in July. President Reagan has imposed a 100 percent retaliatory tariff on certain Japanese imports April 17.

Citicorp, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and Bankers Trust report major losses July 21, blaming nonpayment of foreign debts.

The U.S. Senate votes 91 to 2 August 3 to confirm President Reagan's choice of economist Alan Greenspan, now 61, as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. He succeeds Paul Volcker, who has resigned, and although he sharply disagrees with Volcker on the subject of bank deregulation he promises to be as aggressive as Volcker in fighting inflation. Senators Bill Bradley (D. N.J.) and Kent Conrad (D. N.D.) have voted against Greenspan's confirmation, preferring someone with more international experience.

Congress acts under the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act September 26 to enforce budget balancing by imposing automatic spending cuts. President Reagan adamantly opposes any tax increases; he signs an overall spending measure December 22 designed to hold down the federal deficit.

President Reagan and Canada's prime minister Brian Mulroney sign a free-trade agreement October 3. Canada's Liberal and New Democratic parties have opposed the pact (see 1988).

Wall Street's Dow Jones average starts the year at 1895.95 and closes above 2000 for the first time January 8. Three traders are charged February 12 with illegal "insider" trading that has given them millions in profits (see 1986). Former U.S. treasury secretary Robert B. Anderson, 77, is sentenced for tax evasion June 25. The sentence: 1 month in prison, 5 months of house arrest, and 5 years' probation. The Dow peaks at 2722.42 August 25, falls to 2346 in the third week of October (after rising a record 75.23 points September 22), then plunges 508 points—22.6 percent—on October 19 to 1738.74, a drop even sharper than that of October 1929, as New York Stock Exchange volume exceeds 604 million shares. Pundits blame computerized trading programs, the U.S. trade and budget deficits, and other factors. By August 24, 1989, the Dow will have topped its 1987 highs (see 1991).

The AFL-CIO executive council votes October 24 to permit the Brotherhood of Teamsters to rejoin; the union was expelled in 1957 for reasons of ethics.

Romanian tractor factory workers at Brasov lead a protest in November, complaining of a decline in living standards after months of energy rationing. President Ceausescu's Securitate (secret police) arrest hundreds.

The Tokyo Stock Exchange agrees December 16 to add 16 more foreign securities firms to the six that have had seats since 1985.

Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes December 31 at 1938.80, up from its 1986 close of 1895.95.

retail, trade

Christmas retail sales remain robust at U.S. stores, belying predictions of a sharp decline as a fallout of the October stock market collapse.

energy

A powerful superconductor made of ceramic and capable of operating at relatively high temperatures is announced March 17 (see 1986), but experts say that while its potential for generating cheap power is enormous it may be decades before that potential can be realized.

The National Appliance Energy Conservation Act signed into law by President Reagan March 17 requires manufacturers to make their products more energy efficient. The Senate has approved the measure February 17 by a vote of 89 to 6 and the House has concurred by a voice vote March 3, and although Reagan quashed an almost identical bill with a pocket veto at the end of last year's session on grounds that it would intrude "unduly on the free market," it is clear that no company will make the necessary changes on its own initiative, that Congress recognizes a need for government to act, and that it would override another veto. Within 15 years U.S. refrigerators (which run 24 hours per day and use more electricity than any other household appliance) will be using fully one-third less electricity (see air conditioners, 2004).

transportation

President Reagan vetoes a highway appropriations bill; Congress overrides his veto March 27.

Chrysler Corp. acquires American Motors for $1.2 billion August 5, paying mostly for the Jeep brand that it will develop (see 1979; 1986).

Automaker Henry Ford II dies of pneumonia at his native Detroit September 29 at age 70, having by most accounts revived the fortunes of Ford Motor Company.

A Polish LOT airliner crashes near Warsaw May 9, killing 183; a Northwest Airlines McDonnell-Douglas MD-82 crashes right after take off onto a heavily-traveled road near Detroit Metropolitan airport August 16, killing 153 in the second most deadly U.S. air accident thus far; a South African Airways Boeing 747 goes into the sea south of Mauritius November 26, killing 160; a bomb planted by North Korean terrorists blows up a Korean Air Boeing 747 November 29 and the plane goes into the sea off Burma, killing all 115 aboard.

The English Channel ferry Herald of Free Enterprise leaves Zeebrugge, Belgium, March 6 with its bow loading doors open and capsizes a few hundred yards out, killing 192; a Filipino passenger ferry collides with a tanker off Mindoro Island December 20 and at least 1,500 are drowned.

Japanese National Railways is broken up and privatized, having incurred huge debts to build the bullet-train (Shinkansen) system that began operating in 1964. Critics charge that many of the system's routes were built for reasons of political prestige without regard to whether their construction costs could be recouped.

A fire in London's King's Cross underground station November 17 creates a panic in which 31 are killed, about 50 injured—the highest death toll on the underground since February 1975. Officials say the blaze began in a machine room under the old wooden escalator that links the Piccadilly Line platforms with the station's main ticketing concourse; started by discarded match that ignited grease and debris beneath the escalator, it created a fireball that spread quickly to the ticket office at the station entrance as heavy smoke poured down the tunnels. Critics blame reductions in manpower due to reduced government spending on the underground.

science

University of Cambridge zoologist Jennifer "Jenny" Clack, 46, sheds possible new light on evolution by discovering most of an Acanthostega skeleton on the east coast of Greenland. A salamander that lived in the muck at the bottom of warm lagoons some 360 million years ago, the Acanthostega had gills but also had four legs long before tetrapods (quadrupeds) walked on land.

Nobel biochemist John H. Northrop dies at Wickenberg, Ariz., May 27 at age 95; Nobel chemist Georg Wiltig at Heidelberg August 26 at age 90; Nobel physicist and transistor co-inventor Walter H. Brattain of Alzheimer's disease complications at Seattle October 13 at age 85; Nobel biochemist Luis Federico Leloir at Buenos Aires December 2 at age 81.

medicine

U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop tells a House subcommittee February 10 that condom commercials should be permitted on TV to help stop the AIDS epidemic (see 1985).

AZT wins FDA approval March 20. Made by Burroughs Wellcome and used for treating AIDS, the reverse transcriptase inhibitor was originally being developed as a cancer treatment; it costs more than $10,000 per year per patient and does not cure the disease but it does extend the lives of patients and relieves some symptoms, although for some it has terrible side effects.

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Davenport, Iowa-born San Francisco Chronicle reporter Randy Shilts, 35, attributes the spread of the disease in America to one Gaetan Dugas, a handsome French-Canadian airline steward who died in March 1984 at age 31 after having survived four bouts of AIDS-related pneumonia. Dugas was known to have contracted the HIV virus through sexual contacts with Africans in Europe during the late 1970s, researchers at the federal Centers for Disease Control at Atlanta have implicated him as a key player in the initial spread of the virus, four of the first 19 cases of AIDS reported in Los Angeles were men who had had sex with Dugas, four others had had sex with one of his sexual partners, and New York's first two known cases, in 1979, had had sex with Dugas, whose disease was diagnosed in 1980 and who told physicians in July 1981 that he had averaged 250 sexual liaisons per year year since 1971 (he called it "gay cancer," refused to believe it could be spread sexually, and—according to Shilts—told a physician, "It's my right to do what I want with my body." Shilts accuses many gay advocates of having treated AIDS initially as a "public relations problem"; he will himself die of AIDS in 1994 at age 42.

Homosexuals demonstrate at Washington October 11 to demand an end to discrimination and more federal funds for the fight against AIDS. Some 600 are arrested trying to enter the Supreme Court to protest a sodomy decision.

French surgeon Phillipe Mouret and his colleagues at Lyons pioneer laparoscopic cholecystectomy with video imaging; they remove a gallbladder without the abdominal incision—and 5-day hospital stay—heretofore required for treating gallstones (see Mühe, 1985). The surgeons distend the abdominal cavity with carbon dioxide gas; introduce laparoscopic imaging and surgical instruments through multiple half-inch incisions; identify, isolate, and divide the cystic duct and artery; and remove the gallbladder from its attachment to the liver (see 1988).

Lovastatin (Mevacor) wins FDA approval in September. Developed by Merck, the cholesterol-lowering drug will soon have a number of competitors.

U.S. spending on health care increases to $500 billion, up 9.8 percent over 1986 (the 1987 inflation rate is 4.4 percent).

Nobel zoologist-immunologist Sir Peter B. Medawar dies at London October 2 at age 72.

religion

PTL minister Jim Bakker resigns March 19 following revelations that he cheated on his wife, Tammy Faye, in 1980 with Massapequa, N.Y.-born church secretary Jessica Hahn, now 27, and used $265,000 in ministry money to buy Hahn's silence (see 1974). Now 48, Bakker and his associates have been selling "lifetime memberships" for $1,000 and more to buyers who thought membership entitled them to stay for 3 nights per year at a luxury hotel in Heritage, U.S.A. (The 500-room hotel cannot possibly accommodate all the "members.") Rev. Jerry Falwell calls Bakker "the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history" and takes over the PTL (see 1989).

Tibetan lama Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche dies at Halifax, Nova Scotia, April 4 at age 47, reportedly of cardiac arrest and respiratory failure but possibly of cirrhosis of the liver (he has allegedly consumed a gallon of sake per day). His body is cremated May 26 at the study center of his Naropa Institute at Barre, Vt., in a rite attended by more than 2,000 students and friends who include poet Allen Ginsberg.

Shiite Muslim Iranians visiting Mecca on their hajj (pilgrimage) stage anti-American demonstrations July 31 and also demonstrate against Sunnis, who back Iraq in the ongoing war with Iran; Saudi police open fire, and by the next day 402 people have been killed and 640 wounded, most of them Iranian pilgrims (see 1989).

education

The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down a Louisiana law that prohibited any teaching of evolution in public schools without also teaching creationism (see 1981). The law violates the First Amendment to the Constitution, the court rules 7 to 2 June 19 in Edwards v. Aguillard; Justices Scalia and Rehnquist dissent (see 1999).

A Massachusetts state appeals court removes Boston public school student assignments from Judge W. Arthur Garrity's supervision (see 1985). The schools are considered sufficiently desegregated to permit an end to school busing (see 1989).

communications, media

A $2 million libel judgment against the Washington Post is reversed on appeal March 13.

France Info is established to provide continuous news on a radio frequency that reaches throughout France.

President Reagan uses his veto power June 20 to quash a bill that would stop the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from dismantling the "Fairness Doctrine" of 1949 (see 1982). The Senate has approved the legislation by a 59-to-31 vote April 21, the House has voted 302 to 102 June 3 in favor of the bill, but Reagan says a law requiring broadcasters to present balanced coverage of controversial issues would violate the First Amendment of the Constitution. "History has shown that the dangers of an overly timid or biased press cannot be averted through bureaucratic regulation," he says, "but only through the freedom and competition that the First Amendment sought to guarantee." Some 10,600 radio stations are now broadcasting nationwide, up from 623 in 1935, and there are 14,000 television stations; opponents of the Fairness Doctrine say it was imposed at a time when there were far fewer stations, and the FCC votes 4 to 0 August 4 to rescind the doctrine. The broadcasting industry hails the decision, its leaders say the effect of the doctrine has been the opposite of what was intended, but consumer advocate Ralph Nader calls the decision a major setback to those trying to advance minority opinions, Senate Commerce Committee chairman Ernest F. Hollings (D. S.C.) and House Commerce Committee chairman John Dingell (D. Mich.) vow to renew their efforts to enact the doctrine into law lest its absence open the door to domination of the airwaves by right-wing commentators (see Limbaugh, 1988).

Nicaragua's anti-Sandanista newspaper La Prensa resumes publication October 1 after a 451-day shutdown; the Roman Catholic radio station that has been off the air by government order since January 1985 resumes broadcasting following a five-nation peace accord.

America Online (AOL) begins using that name (see 1985). Steve Case of Quantum Computer Services has signed a contract with Apple Computer to run an on-line service in competition with CompuServe and Prodigy, which are both much larger. AOL's chat rooms are used mostly to "talk" about sex, and the service will grow to dwarf its competitors (see 1990).

literature

Nonfiction: The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy by William Julius Wilson; Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self by West Virginia-born critic-scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., 37, who visited Africa on a fellowship in 1970 and 1971 and later studied at Clare College, Cambridge, under Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, who persuaded him to study literature rather than history; The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students by Indianapolis-born University of Chicago Plato scholar Allan Bloom, 52, who denounces "cultural relativism," which sees all cultures as equal, calling it an intellectual heresy. He deplores what he calls the feminist transformation of society that has filled women with demands and desires and depleted men of vigor. Bloom compares radical feminism to the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, dismisses anthropologist Margaret Mead as a "sexual adventurer" and compares the Woodstock nation to Hitler's Nuremberg rallies. "Feminism has triumphed over the family," "led to the suppression of modesty," and enabled women to bear children "on the female's terms with or without fathers," he writes, but critics attack Bloom for his polemical tone and right-wing bias; Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know by Memphis-born University of Virginia literary critic E. D. (Eric Donald) Hirsch Jr., 59; Behind the Front Page: A Candid Look at How the News Is Made by David S. Broder; The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Kansas City, Kansas-born author Richard Rhodes, 50.

Author-educator Lynn White Jr. dies of a heart attack at Brentwood, Calif., March 30 at age 79; Primo Levi at his native Turin April 11 at age 67 after plunging down a three-story stairwell in his home (he is thought to have committed suicide); sociologist Gunnar Myrdal dies at Stockholm May 17 at age 88.

Fiction: The Counterlife by Philip Roth; Beloved by Toni Morrison, whose novel is based on the 1856 case of fugitive slave Margaret Garner; The Tenants of Time by Thomas Flanagan; The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe; Empire by Gore Vidal; Presumed Innocent by lawyer-novelist Scott Turow, now 38; Paco's Story by Chicago-born novelist and Vietnam War veteran Larry Heinemann, 43; The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble; Significant Others (stories) by Armistead Maupin; Bluebeard's Egg (stories) by Margaret Atwood; The Age of Grief (stories) by Jane Smiley; Mama by Michigan-born novelist Terry McMillan, 35; Postcards from the Edge by Hollywood actress-novelist Carrie (Frances) Fisher, 30 (daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher); Swann: A Mystery by Carol Shields; The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy; The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke introduces the New Orleans detective Dave Robicheaux; Touch and Bandits by Elmore Leonard.

Novelist Margaret Laurence dies of lung cancer at Lakefield, Ontario, January 5 at age 60; Erskine Caldwell of lung cancer at Paradise Valley, Ariz., April 12 at age 83; detective novelist Josephine Bell April 24 at age 89; novelist-essayist-playwright James Baldwin of stomach cancer at St. Paul de Vence, France, December 1 at age 69; novelist-essayist Marguerite Yourcenar following a stroke at Northeast Harbor, Me., December 17 at age 84; novelist Anthony West following a stroke at Stonington, Conn., December 27 at age 73.

Poetry: My Wicked, Wicked Ways by Sandra Cisneros.

Juvenile: The Children from Sukhavati (Barna fra Sukhavati) by Norwegian high-school teacher Jostein Gaarder, 35; Equal Rights and Mort by Terry Pratchett; How to Be Cool and The Shadow in the Plate by Philip Pullman.

art

Painting: Abstract Picture Gerhard Richter; Diptych by Brice Marden; The Hunger Artist by Elizabeth Murray; Untitled by Willem de Kooning; Constant by Robert Ryman. Andy Warhol dies after gallbladder surgery at New York February 23 at age 58; André Masson at Paris October 28 at age 91; Raphael Soyer of cancer at New York November 4 at age 87 (his twin brother Moses died in 1974, his younger brother Isaac in 1981).

The National Museum of Women in the Arts opens in April at Washington, D.C., under the direction of Wilhelmina Cole Holladay, 64, who has toured U.S. and European galleries and found that female artists since at least the 17th century have generally gone unrecognized by the art establishment. The new museum occupies a converted Masonic Temple, has 67,000 members, and owns 500 works of art; its inaugural exhibition is entitled American Women Artists, 1830-1930.

Adobe Systems introduces Adobe Illustrator, a PostScript-based personal computer program for artists, designers, and technical illustrators (see communications, 1985; photography [Photoshop], 1990).

photography

Eastman Kodak Co. introduces seven products for recording, storing, manipulating, transmitting, and printing electronic still video pictures (see Sony's Mavica, 1981). Eastman scientists last year invented the world's first megapixel sensor, a device that can record 1.4 million pixels to produce a five-by-seven-inch digital print comparable in quality to a photograph (see 1990).

theater, film

Theater: Fences by August Wilson 3/26 at New York's 46th Street Theater, with James Earl Jones, Mary Alice, 526 perfs.; Driving Miss Daisy by Atlanta-born playwright Alfred Uhry, 51, 4/15 at New York's Playwrights Horizons Theater, with Dana Ivey, Morgan Freeman, Ray Gill, 80 perfs.;Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune by Terence McNally 6/2 at the Manhattan Theater Club, with Brooklyn-born actress Edie Falco, 23, Peekskill-born actor Stanley Tucci, 26; Burn This by Lanford Wilson 10/15 at New York's Plymouth Theater, with John Malkovich, 437 perfs.; Lettice and Lovage by Peter Shaffer 10/27 at London's Globe Theatre, with Maggie Smith, Margaret Tyzack.

Actor James Coco dies of a heart attack at New York February 25 at age 56; Joan Greenwood of an apparent heart attack at London February 27 at age 65; Broadway producer Alfred DeLiagre Jr. of lung cancer at New York March 5 at age 82; Morton Minsky (last of the four Minsky brothers) of cancer at New York March 25 at age 85; Walter Abel at Essex, Conn., March 26 at age 88; Hermione Gingold of pneumonia and heart disease at New York May 24 at age 89; Geraldine Page of a heart attack at New York June 13 at age 62; playwright Howard Teichmann of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) at New York July 7 at age 71; actress Vera Allen at Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., August 10 at age 89; Emlyn Williams after cancer surgery at London September 25 at age 81; Jean Anouilh of a heart attack at Lausanne October 3 at age 77; playwright (and former diplomat) Clare Boothe Luce of cancer at Washington, D.C., October 9 at age 84.

Television: The Bold and the Beautiful 3/23 (daytime) on CBS with Judith Baldwin, Ethan Wayne, Katherine Kelly Lang in a soap opera created by William J. Bell; Married . . . with Children 4/16 on the new Fox network with Los Angeles-born actress Katey Sagal, 33, as Peg Bundy; Youngstown, Ohio-born actor Ed O'Neill, 43, as her oafish blue-collar husband; Los Angeles-born actress Christina Applegate, 15, as their daughter Kelly (to 6/9/1997, 261 episodes, despite efforts by Detroit socialite and self-appointed censor Terry Rakoltan to dissuade prominent CEOs from sponsoring the show); Full House 9/22 on ABC with Philadelphia-born former standup comedian Bob Saget, 31, as Danny Tanner; Candace Cameron Bure, 11, as his daughter D. J.; (to 5/23/1995, 191 episodes); thirtysomething 9/29 on ABC with Chicago-born actor Ken Olin, 33, actress Mel Harris, 29, Lansing, Mich.-born actor Timothy Busfield, 30, Polly Draper, Philadelphia-born actress Melanie Mayrojn, 30, Bellevue, Wash.-born actor Peter Horton, 32, in a series created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick (to 5/28/1991); Biography on the A&E (Arts & Entertainment) cable channel (initially a weekly show, it will evolve into a series with 500 producers, associate producers, researchers, and technical staff members working in as many as 10 countries at a time to create 130 1-hour episodes per year, airing 6 days per week, on the lives of subjects as far ranging as Attila the Hun to Mafia leader Carlo Gambino).

Television puppeteer Bil Baird dies of pneumonia brought on by bone-marrow cancer at New York March 18 at age 82; radio dramatist Arch Oboler of a heart attack at Westlake, Calif., March 19 at age 77; Jackie Gleason of cancer at Fort Lauderdale, Fla., June 24 at age 71; Lorne Green of adult respiratory distress syndrome at Santa Monica September 11 at age 72; Dan Rowan of lymphatic cancer at Englewood, Fla., September 22 at age 65.

Films: Gabriel Axe's Babette's Feast with Stéphane Audran; Norman Jewison's Moonstruck with Cher, Nicolas Cage, Olympia Dukakis, Danny Aiello. Also: John Huston's The Dead with Angelica Huston; Peter Greenaway's Drowning by Numbers with Joan Plowright, Bernard Hill; David Jones's 84 Charing Cross Road with Anne Bancroft, Anthony Hopkins; John Boorman's Hope and Glory with Sarah Miles, David Hayman; Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor with Peter O'Toole, Joan Chen, John Lone; John Sayles's Matewan with Kansas City-born actor Chris Cooper, 36; Lasse Halleström's My Life as a Dog with Anton Glanzelius; Joel Coen's Raising Arizona with Nicolas Cage, Holly Hunter; Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum with Gong Li, Jiang Wen; Ramon Menendez's Stand and Deliver with East Los Angeles-born actor Edward James Olmos, 40, Havana-born actor Andy Garcia, 31; Brian De Palma's The Untouchables with California-born actor Kevin Costner, 31 (as gangbuster Eliot Ness; see crime, 1931; 1957), Robert De Niro, Sean Connery.

Filmmaker Norman McLaren dies of a heart attack in a Montreal suburb January 26 at age 72, having pioneered techniques of stop-action cinematography, pixillation, and drawing directly on film; actor Randolph Scott dies of heart and lung ailments at Los Angeles March 2 at age 89; Rita Hayworth of Alzheimer's disease at New York May 14 at age 68; producer Joseph E. Levine at Greenwich, Conn., July 31 at age 81; silent-screen star Pola Negri at San Antonio, Texas, August 1 at age 89; director Clarence Brown at Santa Monica, Calif., August 17 at age 97; director John Huston of emphysema at Middletown, R.I., August 28 at age 81; actor Lee Marvin of a heart attack at Tucson, Ariz., August 29 at age 63; director Mervyn LeRoy of Alzheimer's disease at Beverly Hills September 13 at age 86; Mary Astor of emphysema at Woodland Hills, Calif., September 25 at age 81; Madeleine Carroll near Marabella, Spain, October 2 at age 81; director Rouben Mamoulian at Los Angeles December 4 at age 90.

music

Stage musicals: Sarafina! in June at Johannesburg's Market Theater, with a cast of 23, music and lyrics by Mbongeni Ngema, 35; Into the Woods 11/5 at New York's Martin Beck Theater with Queens, N.Y.-born actress Bernadette Peters (Bernadette Lazzara), 39, Winnipeg-born actress Joanna Gleason, 37, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine, 764 perfs.

Dancer Ray Bolger dies of cancer at Los Angeles January 15 at age 83; comedian-singer Danny Kaye of heart failure at Los Angeles March 3 at age 74; Robert Preston of lung cancer at Santa Barbara March 21 at age 67; Fred Astaire of pneumonia at Los Angeles June 22 at age 88; composer Joseph Meyer at New York June 22 at age 93; choreographer Michael Bennett of AIDS related lymphoma at Tucson, Ariz., July 2 at age 44; librettist Hugh Wheeler at Pittsfield, Mass., July 26 at age 75; choreographer Bob Fosse of a heart attack at Washington, D.C., September 23 at age 60 while mounting a revival of Sweet Charity at the National Theater.

Classical guitarist Andres Segovia dies at Madrid June 2 at age 94; cellist Jacqueline du Pre of multiple sclerosis at London October 19 at age 42 (her career was cut short by the disease about 15 years ago); violinist Jascha Heifetz dies at Los Angeles December 10 at age 86 after undergoing neurosurgery for injuries suffered in a fall.

Congress votes December 11 to make John Philip Sousa's 1897 classic "The Stars and Stripes Forever" America's national march.

Popular songs: Appetite for Destruction (album) by Guns N' Roses, whose album has sales of 17 million copies; Whitney (album) by Whitney Houston; Cloud Nine (album) by former Beatle George Harrison; "Somewhere Out There" by James Horner, Barry Mann, and Cynthia Weil; Bad (album) by Michael Jackson; Tunnel of Love (album) by Bruce Springsteen; Document (album) by R.E.M.; A Momentary Lapse of Reason (album) by Pink Floyd; Tango in the Night (album) by Fleetwood Mac; The Joshua Tree (album) by the Irish rock group U2; Hometown Girl (album) by Princeton, N.J.-born country singer-guitarist-songwriter Mary-Chapin Carpenter, 29; Too Late to Cry (album) by Illinois-born bluegrass fiddler-vocalist Alison Krauss, 16, who will soon head a band named Union Station; Trio (album) by Emmy Lou Harris, Dolly Parton, and Linda Ronstadt; Canciónes de Mi Padre (album) by Ronstadt; "Lavoe Strikes Back" by salsa singer Hector Lavoe; Trust Your Heart (album) by Judy Collins, now 48.

Pianist Liberace dies at Palm Springs, Calif., February 4 at age 67, probably of AIDS; jazz guitarist Freddie Green of a heart attack at Las Vegas March 1 at age 75; Baroness von Trapp after surgery at Morrisville, Vt., March 28 at age 82; songwriter Boudleaux Bryant of cancer at Knoxville, Tenn., June 26 at age 67; jazz and blues aficionado John Hammond at New York July 10 at age 76, having "discovered" Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Billy Holiday, and Bessie Smith. He is credited with having signed Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Springsteen to Columbia Records contracts; jazz bass singer (Otto) Lee Gaines of the Delta Rhythm Boys dies of cancer at Helsinki July 15 at age 73; baritone Hugh Bryant of the Delta Rhythm Boys of a heart attack at Helsinki July 22 at age 58 while singing a gospel hymn at Lee Gaines's funeral; clarinetist Woody Herman dies of congestive heart failure, emphysema, and pneumonia at Los Angeles October 29 at age 74.

sports

The New York Giants beat Denver 39 to 20 at Pasadena January 25 in Super Bowl XXI, but the National Football League Players Association goes on strike September 22 (see 1982). The main issue is free agency (a player's right to change teams without restriction once his contract has expired); other issues include pension benefits, salary scale, drug testing, roster size, and protection for union representatives. The players call off their strike October 15 without an accord in what is generally seen as a defeat for the Players Association.

The Irish Sweepstakes is discontinued February 27 after 57 years, having distributed roughly $500 million in prize money and raised $200 million for hospital building programs. It is replaced in March by a state lottery.

Mike Tyson wins the World Boxing Association heavyweight title from James Smith March 7 in a 12-round decision at Las Vegas (see 1986; 1990).

Adidas athletic shoe marketer and Olympic Games power broker Horst Dassler dies of cancer at Herzogenaurach, West Germany, the night of April 9 at age 51. "He is said to have delivered the votes that elected Juan Antonio Samaranche president of the International Olympic Committee in 1980," writes Sports Illustrated, "and to have helped assure the awarding of the 1992 summer Olympic Games to Samaranche's home town of Barcelona."

Pat Cash, 22, (Australia) wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Martina Navratilova in women's singles; Ivan Lendl wins in U.S. men's singles, Navratilova in women's singles.

Stars and Stripes regains the America's Cup, defeating Australia's Kookaburra III 4 to 0 (see 1983).

Endurance swimmer Lynne Cox crosses the Bering Strait August 7 from Little Diomede Island, Alaska, to the Soviet Union's Big Diomede Island (see English Channel, 1972). Now 30, the five-foot-six American weighs 209 pounds, her weight helps her withstand temperatures reported variously from 39° to 44° F. (4° to 7° C.), the strong currents force her to swim four to six miles, although the actual distance is 2.7 miles (4.3 kilometers), and she is the first person to swim the strait.

The Minnesota Twins win the World Series, beating St. Louis 4 games to 3.

Golfer Henry Cotton dies at London December 22 at age 80 and is awarded a posthumous knighthood.

everyday life

French couturier Christian Lacroix, 36, launches his first collection in July at Hotel Intercontinentale's Salon Impériale Suite and with 5 million francs in backing from the textile conglomerate Financière Agache opens his own haute couture and ready-to-wear business at Paris—the city's first new couture house since 1961. Lacroix originally intended to be a museum curator but has worked at Hermès and since 1981 has been design director for Jean Patou, revitalizing that house and increasing its sales from 30 dresses per year to 100. Interest in fashion will decline in the 1990s and Lacroix will turn to designing homeware and tableware before moving to the creation of costumes for theater, opera, and the films.

The Kipling backpack created by Belgian marine engineer Paul Van de Velde, 29, will gain worldwide popularity among teenagers and adults. Van de Velde has never read the late English author but likes the name; he teams up with an acquaintance who has worked as a luggage craftsman, obtains $300,000 in start-up money from a local investor, and sells the dark green and midnight blue nylon bags store to store at Antwerp.

Gary Kasparov retains his chess title December 19, defeating challenger Anatoly Karpov at Seville. The match ends in a tie, with both players sharing the purse.

crime

Colombian police and military personnel capture billionaire drug lord Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas in a predawn raid on a mansion at Medellín February 4 and promptly extradite him to the United States (he arrives under heavy guard at Tampa, Fla., early February 5). Now 37, Lehder has been the leader of the Medellín Cartel that has reportedly accounted for 80 percent of the cocaine entering the United States (see 1978), he has been wanted since 1981, when he was indicted on charges of having imported 3,000 kilos (6,600 pounds) of cocaine, an order for his extradition was signed in 1984, he offered $350,000 the following year to anyone who killed or captured U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency head John C. Lawn, he has allegedly threatened to kill federal judges if he was taken into custody, and he was indicted at Miami in August of last year on 13 additional charges of drug smuggling and racketeering. His 14 bodyguards exchanged gunfire briefly with the raiding party but were unable to prevent his arrest. Lehder goes on trial at Jacksonville October 5 along with Jack Carlton Reed, 56, of San Pedro, Calif., on charges of having conspired to smuggle 3.3 tons of cocaine via the Bahamas between 1978 and 1980 (see 1988). Colombia angers U.S. officials December 31 by releasing Medellín Cartel leader Jorge Luis Ochoa, wanted for wholesale cocaine trafficking (see 1989).

Japan's highest court makes marital rape a crime in a ruling handed down in July.

Battery accounts for the death of at least 10 U.S. women per day, according to studies of police and hospital reports. By 1991 battery will be the leading cause of injury in adult U.S. women.

Britain has her worst shooting attack on record August 19 at Hungerford, England, where day laborer and gun collector Michael Ryan, 27, goes on a rampage with an AK-47 semiautomatic rifle, an M1 carbine, and three handguns. He kills a woman picnicking in a nearby wood with her two small children, goes home and shoots his mother, with whom he has lived, sets fire to the house, walks down the main street firing at random, holes up in a school, and finally shoots himself dead after having killed 14 people, mortally wounding two others, and wounding 14 more (see 1996).

A British court convicts rape suspect Robert Melias November 13 on the basis of DNA evidence (see 1984). It is the first time such evidence has stood up in court, it is far more accurate than blood-sample matches or fingerprints, will come into worldwide use by detectives worldwide, and will be employed by defense lawyers to exonerate innocent clients.

A Sicilian Mafia trial ends December 16 with 338 of the 452 defendants sentenced to prison, 19 of them for life. Their criminal empire has been built primarily on heroin trafficking in the United States.

environment

The annual report on air pollution issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) April 14 shows a dramatic decline in lead emissions (see 1982). Based on computer estimates, it indicates that emissions to the atmosphere, mostly from motor vehicle exhausts, declined from 162 million tons in 1975 to 44.2 million in 1984 and only 23.2 million in 1985, when the agency cut the allowable lead content in gasoline from 1.1 gram per gallon to 0.1 gram, but nine urban areas still have airborne lead concentrations in excess of the federal clean-air standard of 1.5 microgram per cubic meter, the worst being Gary, Ind., with 12.5 micrograms (see 1996).

The biggest forest fire in recent Chinese history begins May 6 in Heilongjiang Province and continues until June 2, devastating 2.5 million acres (700,000 hectares), killing 193 people, and leaving 50,000 homeless despite the efforts of 40,000 soldiers and forestry police to bring the blazes under control. Forestry minister Yang Zhong is in the hospital when the conflagration begins and is unable to reach the area for more than 2 weeks, but he is dismissed June 6 for "serious dereliction of duty and bureaucratic mismanagement."

Herpetologist Archie Carr dies at his Florida home May 21 at age 78, having devoted much of his life to saving the Caribbean sea turtle.

The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer signed in mid-September by 24 nations and the European Economic Community calls for phasing out of chlorofluorocarbons and other substances that increase incidence of skin cancer. Researchers report December 31 that the ozone shield declined sharply from 1979 through 1986. The protocol will be amended in 1990, 1992, and 1997 to speed up the phase-out.

An Antarctic iceberg 99 miles long breaks off the Ross Ice Shelf discovered in 1842, eliminating the Bay of Whales that has served as a major center of exploration.

Zimbabwean game wardens in the Zambezi Valley receive authority to shoot poachers on sight in a move to protect the country's dwindling herds of black rhinoceros, whose horns are used for dagger handles in North Yemen and as a supposed aphrodisiac in East Asia. Africa had 65,000 black rhinos in 1970 but now has fewer than 5,000, with 500 to 1,000 of them in Zimbabwe (most of the poachers are poor blacks from neighboring Zambia).

An earthquake registering 7.0 on the Richter scale rocks lands on the Colombia-Ecuador border March 6, killing upwards of 1,000; a quake registering 6.1 strikes Los Angeles October 1, killing six, injuring 100.

Brazilian landowners burn 80,000 square miles of Amazon rain forest in 79 days (July 15 through October 2), heightening environmentalist fears that loss of oxygen from the forest will create a "greenhouse effect," increasing global temperatures and raising sea levels. Tax incentives encourage turning jungle into ranch land (see 1989).

A Colombian avalanche September 28 kills at least 120.

Britain's worst storm in memory strikes just after midnight October 16, knocking down thousands of trees and causing other damage.

marine resources

The Laguna Madre Shrimp Farm on the inner coast of South Padre Island between Brownsville and Corpus Christi, Texas, produces nearly 400,000 pounds of shrimp, up from 200,000 pounds last year; commercial shrimp trawlers bring in close to 250 million pounds, but rising consumer demand is depleting supplies of wild shrimp.

agriculture

Gene-altered bacteria to aid agriculture are tested April 24 despite alarms by some that scientists have unloosed a monster.

nutrition

Nobel physician William P. Murphy dies at Brookline, Mass., October 9 at age 95, having helped to pioneer effective treatment of pernicious anemia.

consumer protection

A study published in the February 28 issue of the British Medical Journal confirms earlier studies suggesting that while bacteria can convert nitrates to nitrites, and while intestinal flora can convert dietary nitrites into nitrosamines, groups of people in Canada, England, Japan, and Louisiana with high rates of stomach cancer have not had higher exposure to nitrates than do groups with lower rates of the disease. Epidemiologists explain that the major sources of nitrates are fruits and vegetables, which also contain vitamin C, and vitamin C effectively inhibits formation of nitrosamines. But in parts of the world where food preservation is inadequate, or where intake of preserved fish (see 1983), certain types of soy sauce, or fava beans is high, exposure to nitrosamines may indeed play a role in causing cancer.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration bans most uses of sulfites in fresh foods after a 5-year campaign by the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

food and drink

U.S. microwave oven sales reach a record 12.6 million (see 1967). Sears Roebuck's Kenmore is the largest-selling brand, followed by Sharp and General Electric. Food companies rush to develop microwavable food products.

Snapple ready-to-drink bottled iced tea is introduced by the 15-year-old Snapple Beverage Co., which virtually creates a new category of soft drink that will grow in 6 years to have 14 Snapple tea flavors, including lemon, mint, orange, peach, raspberry (and four diet varieties)—and some high-powered competitors (see Lipton, 1958).

Kellogg introduces Just Right breakfast food containing raisins, nuts, and dates in addition to corn and wheat flakes.

restaurants

Brooklyn-born entrepreneur Howard Schultz, 33, buys the 16-year-old Seattle coffee-bean business Starbucks and starts building an empire of coffee bars to supplement the company's wholesale and mail-order operations. He will have 470 coffee bars by late 1994, with 8,000 employees, and by 2005 there will be more than 9,000 Starbucks cafés in 30 countries with four more opening every day.

1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990

Archaeology

In May workers digging an irrigation ditch near Wenatchee, Washington, find six Clovis spear points. Peter Mehringer starts a study of the site, dating it at about 11,500 years old, the first undisturbed Clovis site known. Most anthropologists believe the Clovis people were the first humans in the Americas. See also 1978 Archaeology.

Harvey Weiss announces the discovery of 1100 Akkadian clay tablets, the largest cache of cuneiform tablets found since 1933. The tablets, dating from about 1740 bce to 1725 bce, from northern Mesopotamia at a place called Tell Leilan, had been excavated in September and October 1986.

David Stuart, a student at Princeton University working for William L. Fash, discovers a new find at Copán, the most worked-over of Mayan cities. Stuart uncovers a cache that includes jade pieces, a flint knife thought to have been used in human sacrifice, and instruments for ritual blood letting. See also 1984 Archaeology.

A team of scientists coordinated by Farouk el-Baz [b. Zagazig, Egypt, January 1, 1938] drills into a chamber at the base of the Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt, to assess the air and the condition of a boat believed to be buried in the chamber. The hope for obtaining ancient Egyptian air is not realized but the boat is located. Farouk el-Baz will report in 1988 that the chamber contains hot, humid air that is a danger to the 4600-year-old boat. See also 1984 Archaeology.

Susan Pevonak, a student volunteer working for Dale Croes at a Coast Indian site near Sekiu, Washington, finds a microlith attached to a wooden handle. It is the first of the small stone blades, which are known from many sites around the world, ever found attached. It provides insights into how the tools were used. See also 15,000 bce Tools.

Shortly past midnight on February 24 Ian Shelton observes the nearest observable supernova to Earth since 1604 (also photographed by Robert McNaught on February 23, but not noticed until plate is developed). The supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), now known as Supernova 1987A, was formerly the blue giant star Sanduleak 69.202. Ten neutrinos from the explosion are detected by the team of Masatoshi Koshiba [b. Toyohashi, Japan, September 19, 1926] at the Kamiokande neutrino telescope in Japan, and another eight neutrinos are observed at the IMB neutrino telescope in Ohio on February 23. The supernova becomes as bright as the combined light of all the stars of the LMC. See also 2002 Physics.

Benjamin Zuckerman and Eric E. Becklin report that they have found a brown dwarf in orbit around Giclas 29-38, about 50 light-years from Earth. The brown dwarf, a starlike body that is too small to produce full-scale nuclear fusion but too large to be classed as a planet, is manifested as excess infrared radiation. Later studies will suggest that it is a dust cloud. See also 1999 Astronomy.

Brent Tully's paper announcing his discovery of the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex, the largest structure discovered thus far in the universe, appears in the Astrophysical Journal. See also 1953 Astronomy.

C. Roger Lynds and Vahe Petrosian in January locate two enormous arcs of light, each larger than a single galaxy. By November they have established that one of the arcs, in Abell 370, is the image of a far-distant, unseen galaxy that has been distorted by a gravitational lens. It is thought that the other is also the result of a gravitational lens. See also 1979 Astronomy.

Jules Halpern discovers a very hot star at the location of an invisible gamma-ray source termed Geminga. See also 1973 Astronomy.

Francesco Paresce and Christopher Burrows discover a disk of larger particles around the star Beta Pictoris (at a distance of 53 light-years), which they believe to be a disk of protoplanets, objects that will eventually crash into each other and fuse to form planets. See also 1984 Astronomy.

Jack Strominger, Donald Wiley [b. October 21, 1944, d. Memphis, Tennessee, November 16, 2001], and coworkers determine the three-dimensional structure of the major histocompatibility protein, an essential part of the immune system. Part of the structure appears to be a pocket that holds and binds an antigen. See also 1967 Medicine & health.

Hans Fricke uses a submersible to observe coelacanths, the famous "living-fossil" fish, in their natural habitat in the deep Indian Ocean. Instead of crawling on the ocean floor as some scientists expected, the fish swim slowly and frequently perform headstands or swim upside down. See also 1938 Biology.

Hans Thoenen isolates brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDF), a growth factor that directs the position and growth of brain cells.

The genomes for a virus that causes dengue fever (type 1) and for the hepatitis A virus are sequenced. See also 1985 Biology; 1988 Biology.

For the first time a crime suspect is convicted on the basis of genetic fingerprinting in the United Kingdom. Later in the year, the same technique is used in resolving a rape case in the United States. See also 1984 Biology.

The first test of free-living genetically engineered bacteria is conducted when scientists on April 24 spray strawberry fields with bacteria that have had an ice-forming gene deleted. See also 1986 Biology.

Charles J. Pedersen and Donald J. Cram of the United States and Jean-Marie Lehn of France win the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work in making complicated molecules that perform the same functions as natural proteins. See also 1960 Chemistry; 1967 Chemistry.

Telephones become available on Japanese airliners; calls are relayed by satellite. See also 1991 Communication.

Sega Electronics introduces a 3-D video game; images for the left and right eye are displayed in quick alternation (every 1/60 second) on a screen while the viewer looks at the picture with special liquid crystal glasses that pass light in quick alternation. When the left image is displayed on screen, the left lens of the glasses is transparent, and vice versa. The alternation of images is so fast that the eye combines it into a three-dimensional image. See also 1972 Communication.

James Ryan reports in May that the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has definitely detected the motion of Earth's crustal plates using very-long-baseline interferometry and radio noise from distant quasars, thus confirming plate tectonics. See also 1963 Earth science.

Wade Miller discovers a fossilized dinosaur egg that contains the oldest known embryo of any kind, probably the embryo of an allosaur from about 150,000,000 years ago. The embryo is detected by X rays of the egg and is less than 2 cm (1 in.) long.

Kevin Aulenback discovers the second known cache of dinosaur eggs that contain fossilized unhatched dinosaurs, probably duck-billed dinosaurs, near Milk River in Alberta, Canada. See also 1926 Anthropology; 1995 Earth science.

The headquarters of the Internationale Nederlanden Group Bank in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is completed; its ten skylight-topped towers are contoured to maximize natural lighting, produce solar heating, and deflect the wind, making it one of the best-known examples of the "green architecture" movement for commercial buildings. See also 1992 Ecology & the environment.

Orange Band, the last dusky seaside sparrow, dies in captivity of old age, completing the extinction of the species. Some of the species' genetic heritage has been preserved, however, by a program of crossbreeding the last five dusky seaside males with females of the closely related Scott's seaside sparrow.

The American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) is removed from the U.S. Endangered Species List. Relentless hunting of the species to obtain their hides for leather was the cause of endangerment. A rapid breeder, they quickly recovered while they were protected. See also 1985 Ecology & the environment; 1994 Ecology & the environment.

In an effort to save the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus), the last wild bird is captured and brought into a captive breeding program. Beginning in 1992, young birds will be released in the wild.

David Miller at Bell Labs invents the Symmetric Self-Electro-optic Effect Device, S-SEED, an electroptical component that alters its reflectivity to light when irradiated by a laser. The S-SEED will later be used as a component of the first optical computer, built in 1990. See also 1990 Electronics.

Computer chips are manufactured with 1 megabit (1000 kilobits or 1,048,576 bits) of computer memory; in February IBM and Nippon Telephone and Telegraph Limited (NTT) of Japan introduce experimental 4 and 16 megabit chips. See also 1984 Electronics; 1990 Electronics.

A Japanese firm, Nippon Zeon, develops a plastic with memory. Upon deformation, it bends and keeps its bent shape at low and modest temperatures. It returns to its initial form when heated to a temperature of 37°C (99°F). See also 1962 Materials.

A team led by Paul Ching-Wu Chu [b. Hunan, China, December 2, 1941] becomes the first group to make a material that is superconducting at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, which is 77 K (-196°C, or -321°F). See also 1986 Physics; 1988 Physics.

Yasumasa Kanada, David Bailey, Jonathan Borwein, and Peter Borwein calculate π to 134,000,000 decimal places, using a NEC SX-2 supercomputer. See also 1995 Mathematics.

Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo agree with each other on sharing credit for discovering HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, publishing their agreement in Nature. See also 1984 Medicine & health.

Kevin P. Campbell and Roberto Coronado announce in December that they have located the protein used to regulate the passage of calcium into and out of muscle cells, the key step in muscle contraction or relaxation. The new protein is named the calcium release channel.

Sir Walter Bodmer [b. Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 1936], Ellen Solomon, H.J.R. Bussey, and Alec Jeffreys announce that they have found a marker for a gene that causes cancer of the colon. See also 1978 Medicine & health.

A team led by A. Hari Reddi at the National Institutes of Health extracts and identifies bone morphogenetic protein (B.M.P.), a substance predicted first by Marshall Urist in the 1960s. B.M.P. encourages new bone to grow and is expected to help cure fractures that otherwise are resistant to healing as well as speeding healing in more ordinary fractures and bone damage caused by surgery.

Experimental vaccination of foxes against rabies begins in Belgium, using baits containing a vaccine created by genetic engineering and dropped from helicopters. The experiment is successful and leads to large-scale vaccination campaigns. See also 1885 Medicine & health; 1990 Medicine & health.

The antidepressant drug fluoxetine, better known by its trade name of Prozac, is licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It works by reducing the uptake of serotonin by brain cells, permitting more to be available at nerve endings -- hence it is termed a "serotonin uptake inhibitor." See also 1952 Medicine & health.

Susumu Tonegawa of the United States wins the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for his studies of antibodies and the immune system. See also 1976 Biology.

Michael K. Moe, Alan A. Hahn, and Steve R. Elliot observe the double beta decay of selenium-82, predicted since 1935 but previously unobserved; they also establish that selenium-82 has the longest half-life ever measured: 1.1 × 10²⁰ years.

Dieter Kroekel, Naomi Halas, Giampiero Giuliani, and Daniel Grischkowsky of IBM produce a "dark-pulse" soliton, a standing wave that propagates through an optical fiber without spreading and which consists of a short interruption of a light pulse. See also 1980 Physics.

Georg Bednorz of West Germany and K. Alex Müller of Switzerland win the Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery of superconductivity in a material at a higher temperature than previously known. See also 1986 Physics.

Arthur Rich and James Van House develop the positron microscope. The microscope functions in a similar way as an electron microscope, but uses positrons emitted from a radioactive source. See also 1985 Tools.

The American company 3 D Systems develops a system to produce plastic prototypes of objects designed by CAD (computer-aided design) techniques; they polymerize a liquid plastic into the computer-designed shape with an ultraviolet laser beam steered by a computer. The newly created object can then be lifted out of the liquid plastic. See also 1964 Communication; 1991 Tools.

Cornell University in Ithaca New York opens a new laboratory for the development of tiny, submicroscopic tools. It is called the National Nanofabrication Facility. See also 1959 Tools; 1988 Tools.

Two Soviet cosmonauts begin long tours in space on the Soyuz TM 2 mission. Yuri V. Romanenko returns to Earth from the Mir space station after 326 days in space, a new record. Two cosmonauts and Muhammad Faris, the first Syrian in space, begin the eight-day Soyuz TM 3 mission. The Soyuz TM 4 mission begins on December 20. Three cosmonauts set a new record of 366 days in space about the Mir space station. See also 1986 Transportation.

A subway system controlled by computers using fuzzy logic, designed by Serji Yasunobu of Hitachi, starts operation in Sendai, Japan, 320 km (200 mi) north of Tokyo. See also 1985 Electronics.

Drama and Theater

• Robert Harling (b. 1951): Steel Magnolias. Harling, who earned a law degree at Tulane University, had written his hit play, about a young woman stricken with an illness but determined to live life to the fullest, in a ten-day stretch while coping with the death of his sister from kidney failure in 1985. It is, by Harling's admission, the first thing he ever wrote. After opening off-Broadway, Steel Magnolias tours the United States and Europe before being adapted for the big screen in 1989. Harling would cowrite the screenplay for the comedy Soapdish (1991).
• Velina Hasu Houston: Tea. The third part of a well-received trilogy, this play concerns four Japanese war brides living on a military base in Kansas. The tea ceremony becomes their refuge in an alien culture. Much of their talk concerns a fifth war bride who committed suicide after killing her husband.
• Tina Howe: Coastal Disturbances. Howe specializes in American eccentrics--this time, a group at the beach in a time of late-summer romances. As in her other work, she enjoys conflating the ordinary, conventional scenes of American life with absurd, spontaneous, and irrational elements that mock accepted notions of reality.
• Terrence McNally: Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. A middle-aged man and woman, wary of each other because of many disappointments, gradually explore the possibility of a life together. A comedy, it also has serious overtones expressing McNally's wry sensibility and compassion for his characters. Critics praise the play for honestly portraying its characters' valiant efforts to overcome their sense of injury.
• Arthur Miller: Danger: Memory! This work collects two one-act plays: I Can't Remember Anything and Clara. Each is performed at New York's Lincoln Center.
• Stephen Sondheim: Into the Woods. In Sondheim's inventive musical, Cinderella, Jack (and the Beanstalk), Little Red Riding Hood, and other fairy tale figures encounter one another on the same day in the forest. This delightful fantasy pokes fun at the self-enclosed world of fairy tales and makes their characters not only react to one another but to the consequences of their actions.
• Alfred Uhry (b. 1936): Driving Miss Daisy. Uhry's first nonmusical drama opens off-Broadway, where it plays for 1,195 performances. The story revolves around the relationship between an elderly Jewish matron in Atlanta and her black driver, on whom she becomes increasingly dependent. Actress Jessica Tandy would earn an Oscar for her 1989 performance in the title role of the film version.
• August Wilson: Fences. Wilson's play about a disappointed former Negro Baseball League veteran, ex-con, and garbage collector opens in New York, where it plays for 526 performances. It sets a record for nonmusical drama on Broadway by grossing $11 million in its first year while capturing the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.

Fiction

• Paul Auster: The Locked Room. The final volume of Auster's New York trilogy, concerns Fanshawe, a brilliant writer who has disappeared and is presumed dead. Critics praise this novel as both the most accessible and brilliantly conceived in the trilogy because it fuses Auster's philosophical concerns with the creation of riveting characters and a suspenseful plot.
• John Barth: The Tidewater Tales. Barth's novel concerns a case of writer's block as a writer and his wife sail around Chesapeake Bay.
• Saul Bellow: More Die of Heartbreak. This comic novel is largely the monologue of Kenneth Trachtenberg, a Russian history expert who tells the story of his uncle, Benn Crader, a botanist. Though perhaps it is less ambitious than Bellow's greatest novels, critics nevertheless find in this work a continuation of Bellow's concern with the way the world of ideas crosses the world of human characters.
• T. Coraghessan Boyle: World's End. Boyle's novel, set in the author's native Peekskill, New York, is a work of magic realism in which characters from the seventeenth and twentieth centuries interact. It is widely considered Boyle's most accomplished work to date, and its structure and scope mark a departure from his usual absurdist black humor.
• Truman Capote: Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel. What had long been promised as Capote's magnum opus is finally published, consisting of stories previously appearing in Esquire in the 1970s. It is a roman à clef, anatomizing the New York social set in what many regard as a series of malicious character portraits but others defend as a disappointingly unfulfilled social satire that might well have become Capote's masterpiece.
• Robert Coover: Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? The novella, first published in the American Review in 1975, recounts the title character's football career, off-the-field sexual exploits, and death during a steel strike. Dealing with myth and history, Coover turns, in the words of one reviewer, "a very amusing novel to a seriously funny one."
• James Dickey: Alnilam. Dickey's second novel concerns a blind man's investigation of his flyer son's death. The writer declares that he "tried to do for the air what Melville did for the water." Critic Robert Towers calls it a "vast, intricate work distinguished not by its forward momentum but by its symbolic suggestiveness and its bravura passages, some of which rise to visionary heights."
• Michael Dorris (1945-1997): A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. Dorris's best-selling and critically acclaimed first novel, treating the experiences of three generations of Native American women, establishes Dorris as a leading contemporary Native American writer. He would treat more fully the background of a part African American, part Native American character introduced here in his final novel, Cloud Chamber (1997). Dorris, of Modoc Indian heritage, founded the Native American studies program at Dartmouth College in 1972. In 1981 he married novelist Louise Erdrich.
• John Gregory Dunne: The Red White and Blue. In this ambitious political novel, the plot centers on the Brodericks, a family that loosely resembles the Kennedys. Power games abound both in politics and in the Catholic Church--a subject that Dunne had also covered in True Confessions (1977). While The Red White and Blue lacks the intensity of Dunne's earlier fiction, critics admire the broad canvas of the novel and its shrewd judgments of American institutions.
• Stanley Elkin: The Rabbi of Lud. This novel about a New Jersey rabbi reflects Elkin's characteristic obsession with mortality. Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn is beset with problems with his family and his spiritual vocation. In a typical Elkin move, Goldkorn travels to Alaska and becomes the rabbi of the Alaskan pipeline. Critics admire Elkin's unblinking portrayal of rather grim material, which he is able to energize and even make endearing.
• Bret Easton Ellis: The Rules of Attraction. Ellis's second novel depicts the self-indulgent lifestyle of faculty and students at a small eastern liberal arts college who, in the words of reviewer Scott Spencer, "live in a world of conspicuous and compulsive consumption--consuming first one another, and then drugs, and then anything else they can lay their hands on."
• Richard Ford: Rock Spring. Ford's first collection contains some of his most admired stories, set mainly in Montana, including "Children," "Great Falls," and the title work, which face the crisis moments in relationships and families.
• Kaye Gibbons (b. 1960): Ellen Foster. Gibbons's first novel treats an eleven-year-old girl's coping with the suicide of her mother as well as her abusive father. It introduces Gibbons's characteristic subject of Southern women trying to fashion satisfactory lives for themselves. The North Carolina-born writer's other works would include A Virtuous Woman (1989), A Cure for Dreams (1991), Charms for the Easy Life (1993), and Sights Unseen (1995).
• Rolando Hinojosa: Klail City. The second novel of the writer's "Klail City Death Trip" continues the story of Jehu Malacara and Rafe Buenrostro, characters introduced in the novelist's exploration of the borderland between Mexico and Texas, The Valley (1983). More than just a document of a period in American and Mexican history, these novels have been celebrated for their irony, satire, and stark realism.
• Jerzy Kosinski: The Hermit of 69th Street. Kosinski's final novel, an "autofiction," describes the travails of a burnt-out writer. It incorporates Kosinski's defense against charges of plagiarism leveled at him in 1982, when Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith suggested in a Village Voice article that certain passages of Kosinski's works had actually been written by editorial assistants.
• Joseph McElroy (b. 1930): Women and Men. This twelve-hundred-page novel is McElroy's most ambitious work. Set in the 1970s, the story focuses on James Mayn, a journalist, and Grace Kimball, a radical feminist. The way these characters view the world is influenced by their gender and also by an informed understanding of science. His previous novels include A Smuggler's Bible (1966), Hind's Kidnap (1969), and Cookout Cartridge (1974).
• Larry McMurtry: Texasville. McMurtry returns to Thalia, Texas, and to Sonny and Duane, the memorable characters from his highly praised The Last Picture Show (1966). The problems centering on the characters' love lives (and Duane's involvement in civic affairs) receive comic treatment in a work that critics praise as a fine farewell to the phase of McMurtry's closely observed works about northern Texas.
• Toni Morrison: Beloved. Morrison's harrowingly powerful novel deals with a black woman who must deal with the effect of murdering her own child rather than having the girl returned to slavery. The spirit of the murdered child returns to claim retribution. Suffused with realism and fantasy, the novel wins the Pulitzer Prize and is widely regarded as Morrison's masterpiece.
• Howard Norman (b. 1949): The Northern Lights. This debut novel is a coming-of-age story inspired by the writer's life among the Cree Indians while working as a firefighter in Manitoba in the 1960s. It is nominated for a National Book Award.
• Cynthia Ozick: The Messiah of Stockholm. Ozick's novel concerns Lars Andemening, a Polish refugee who takes a Swedish name but fantasizes that he is the son of Bruno Schulz, the famous Polish Jewish writer who wrote about and was a victim of the Holocaust. His fate poses yet another version of Ozick's much-praised quest for what it means to be a contemporary Jew.
• Walker Percy: The Thanatos Syndrome. Dr. Thomas More, the protagonist of an earlier Percy novel, Love in the Ruins (1971), returns home from prison to find his former patients depressed and physically debilitated. As in Percy's other novels, the symptoms are as much spiritual as material. Like Flannery O'Connor, however, Percy is such a fine dramatist of human misery and sin that his theological vision does not detract from the development of character and plot but positively energizes it.
• Marge Piercy: Gone to Soldiers. Piercy registers the impact of World War II on a large collection of characters in this novel, which draws praise for its sensitivity.
• Jane Smiley: The Age of Grief: A Novella and Stories. Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, the volume includes stories about family life and marriage. Critics admire the psychological penetration of the title story, in which an apparently happy and attractive couple are devastated by infidelity.
• Scott Turow (b. 1949): Presumed Innocent. Turow's first novel, a legal thriller about a prosecuting attorney charged with the murder of his female colleague with whom he had been having an affair, was written while Turow was commuting from his job as a U.S. district attorney in Chicago. It spends more than forty-three weeks on the bestseller list and sells more than four million paperback copies.
• Gore Vidal: Empire. One of Vidal's most rousing and comprehensive historical novels features pithy portraits of Henry Adams, Henry James, William Randolph Hearst, John Hay, and Theodore Roosevelt. His fictional plot, concerning the newspaper dynasty of Caroline and Blaise Sanford and Congressman James Burden Day, provides a fascinating conjunction of government and media in the creation of modern America.
• Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: Bluebeard. Vonnegut brings back the painter Rabo Karabekian from Breakfast of Champions (1973) in this meditation on art and war, as Rabo composes both his autobiography and his daily diary.
• Tom Wolfe: The Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe's first novel, about the downfall of a successful New York financial trader, captures a cultural moment and the public imagination. Illustrating the differences between life on Park Avenue and life in the outer borough projects of New York City during the "greedy 1980s," Wolfe's book is a bestseller and one of the era's defining reflections.

Literary Criticism and Scholarship

• Sven Birkerts (b. 1951): An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature. This collection by the Michigan literary critic and lecturer in expository writing at Harvard reflects the critic's penchant for European literature. A foe of minimalism, Birkerts prefers writers such as Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard, and Erich Heller, and Americans such as Susan Sontag, who carry on European traditions. Reviewer Donald Hall celebrates Birkerts as a critic worth arguing with, and he honors Birkerts's efforts to revive the importance of European literature in America, even if readers must absorb it in translation. His second book, The Electric Life (1989), would win the PEN Award for distinguished essays.
• Hazel V. Carby (b. 1948): Reconstructing Womanhood: The Rise of the Black Woman Novelist. Carby, a British-born professor at Wesleyan University, sees the advent of black women novelists as an important corrective to black male writers, who have favored a romanticized view of black folk roots. Carby's strongly argued neo-Marxist view gains considerable influence in academic circles. Race Men would follow in 1998.
• Henry James: The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. This is the most thorough edition of James's extant notebooks and pocket diaries--an extraordinary source for following the development of his stories, plays, and novels.
• Robert Lowell: Collected Prose. This collection consists of reviews, essays, eulogies, interviews, and memoirs. The work includes essays on Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and other poets. Lowell's method is both critical and biographical. Included also are searching portraits of New England writers and a final section of commentary on his own work.
• Helen Vendler (b. 1933): Voices and Visions: The Poet in America. One of America's most distinguished critics of poetry and a Harvard professor, Vendler edits a collection of essays on poets from Walt Whitman to Sylvia Plath, the companion volume of a 1988 PBS series. She notes the common focus of the essays: explorations of the poetic traditions that American writers inherited, modified, and later transformed into unique expressions of the American character. A highly integrated and comprehensive study, it includes the work of critics such as Calvin Bedient, Richard Sewall, Richard Poirier, and Helen McNeil.

Nonfiction

• Allan Bloom (1930-1992): The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom's scathing analysis of the shortcomings of modern higher education provokes a storm of controversy--and self-flagellation--in the academy. The book becomes a number one bestseller, attacks contemporary students for their spiritual decline and lack of intellectual curiosity, and blames universities for contributing to this decline. Born in Indianapolis, Bloom was educated at the University of Chicago, where he was professor of philosophy and political science.
• Joan Didion: Miami. Didion explores the Cuban exile community and finds an insulated, solipsistic, and politically unstable environment. Her view of the exiles' fixation on Communist Cuba is scorching and forms part of her long-term study of displaced persons and alienated individuals, extending over several distinguished novels and works of nonfiction.
• David Herbert Donald: Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe. Donald wins his second Pulitzer Prize for this biography of Thomas Wolfe, praised for its balance and thoroughness.
• Andrea Dworkin: Intercourse. Dworkin's controversial polemic is a literary and cultural analysis that depicts heterosexual intercourse as the basis for women's oppression.
• Ian Frazier (b. 1951): Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody. Frazier, an Ohio-born essayist and journalist, establishes his critical reputation as a meticulous observer of details that add up to a comic vision of modern life. His descriptions of people are memorable--the proprietor of a fishing-goods store who discourses on exotic flies, the writer of the "Hints from Heloise" columns, and two Russian immigrant artists.
• James Gleick (b. 1954): Chaos: Making a New Science. Gleick, a science and technology reporter for the New York Times, is lauded for his skill in writing a popular book about science--particularly the complex and mysterious new field known as chaos theory.
• Doris Kearns Goodwin (b. 1943): The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga. Goodwin chronicles three generations of the Irish American political dynasty, from John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald in 1863 to the inauguration of his grandson John F. Kennedy in 1961. Goodwin is the author of the biography Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976) and No Ordinary Time (1994), a study of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during wartime.
• E. D. Hirsch Jr.: Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Literary critic Hirsch analyses the causes of the decline of literacy. Although he acknowledges the role of television and other media, which draw students away from reading, his main target is American educators. They have failed, in his view, to insist on basic cultural literacy. Although his thesis is controversial, Hirsch's ideas prompt many critics to call for an increase in the sheer quantity of literature and history that students must master in order to become "culturally literate."
• Mary McCarthy: How I Grew. This is a continuation of McCarthy's celebrated Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), moving beyond her childhood to cover her maturation. Though it is less evocative than her earlier volume, critics nevertheless find it a compelling account of the writer's adolescent reading, her years at Vassar, and her first marriage--a record of what life was like for a brilliant young woman in the 1920s.
• Arthur Miller: Timebends. This autobiography is a cinematically constructed work, roaming back and forth between Miller's life and works--rather like a film with flashbacks, montages, and fades. He deals with his controversial leftist politics and his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, analyzing the mistakes he made in public and in private.
• Randy Shilts (1951-1994): And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. Shilts, a staff reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, wins numerous awards as well as plaudits for providing the most definitive study of the illness to date. Shilts tells his story by focusing on individuals both obscure and well known, and the book has the sweep and momentum of a well-constructed novel.

Poetry

• A. R. Ammons: Sumerian Vistas. This collection, inspired by various landscapes, includes the powerful lyrical sequence "Tombstones" and the Whitmanesque "The Ridge Farm."
• Lucille Clifton (b. 1936): Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980. This book collects works from Clifton's previous volumes--Good Times (1969), Good News About the Earth (1972), An Ordinary Woman (1974), and Two-Headed Woman (1984)--dealing with the struggles of African Americans, along with a collection of autobiographical pieces that had first appeared in Generations (1976). She also publishes Next: New Poems.
• Mark Doty (b. 1953): Turtle, Swan. Doty's first collection is praised by one reviewer for turning gay experience into "an example of how we live, how we suffer and transcend suffering." It would be followed by a similarly acclaimed second collection, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, in 1991.
• Susan Howe (b. 1937): Articulation of Sound Forms in Time. One part of this collection by the Boston-born poet is about Hope Atherton, a sixteenth-century minister who fought against the Indians in Deerfield, Massachusetts. The other part concentrates on twentieth-century artists. In both parts, Howe employs unconventional punctuation and lines. Critics generally find Howe's experiments convincing and praise her radical effort to foster a "synchronic flow," which impels readers past the breaks or pauses of more traditional poetry.
• William Meredith: Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems. This collection of works from Meredith's seven previous volumes, along with eleven new works, mainly reflects the poet's travels. It wins the Pulitzer Prize.
• Sharon Olds: The Gold Cell: The Matter of This World. Olds's third collection contains works, such as "The Quest," "What If God," and "I Go Back to May 1937," treating her family, the nature of her own body, scenes from urban life, and gruesome accounts of rapes and abandoned babies. The Sign of Saturn: Poems, 1980-1987 would follow in 1991.
• Ellen Bryant Voigt (b. 1943): The Lotus Flowers. The Virginia-born poet's third collection, following Claiming Kin (1977) and The Forces of Plenty (1983), is praised for its skill in depicting the author's Virginia childhood and scenes of rural life in Vermont. Subsequent volumes would include Two Trees (1992), Kyrie (1995), and Shadow of Heaven (2002).
• Theodore Weiss (1916-2003): From Princeton One Autumn Afternoon. The volume provides selections and revisions from Weiss's previous volumes, including the long work "Gunsight," described by one reviewer as a "virtuoso performance." Included as well are several new works. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Weiss was a poet-in-residence and English professor at Princeton.
• C. K. Williams: Flesh and Blood. Critics compare the prose effects of Williams's poetry to work by Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. Like them, Williams eschews rhyme and even conventional rhythm. Although his lines are long, his poems are short and intense, relying not on imagery but on rhetoric to explore ideas such as "Dignity," "Will," "Reading," "Suicide," "Love," and "Good Mother." The collection wins the National Book Critics Circle Award.