The Devil Problem: And Other True Stories

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Random House, 1996 - Current Events - 404 pages
Readers know from his now classic Lenin's Tomb that Remnick is a superb portraitist who can bring his subjects to life and reveal them in such surprising ways as to justify comparison to Dickens, Balzac, or Proust. In this collection, Remnick's gift for character is sharper than ever, whether he writes about Gary Hart stumbling through life after Donna Rice or Mario Cuomo, who now presides over a Saturday morning radio talk show, fielding questions from crackpots, or about Michael Jordan's awesome return to the Chicago Bulls -- or Reggie Jackson's last times at bat.
Remnick's portraits of such disparate characters as Alger Hiss and Ralph Ellison, Richard Nixon and Elaine Pagels, Gerry Adams and Marion Barry are unified by this extraordinary ability to create a living character, so that the pieces in this book, taken together, constitute a splendid pageant of the representative characters of our time.

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Contents

Winter on the Mountain Gary Hart
3
The Situationist Marion Barry
26
Negative Capability Mario Cuomo
63
Copyright

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About the author (1996)

David Remnick was born on October 29, 1958 in Hackensack, N.J. and educated at Princeton University. He began his career at the Washington Post in 1982. In 1992, he became a staff writer for the New Yorker. Remnick's book, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in General Non-Fiction. The work deals with the last days of the Soviet Union, which Remnick witnessed firsthand as foreign correspondent to Moscow from the Washington Post. Remnick is the author of numerous other works including The Devil Problem (And Other True Stories) published in 1996, Resurrection, The Struggle for a New Russia in 1997, and King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero, published in 1998. His most recent title, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, was published in 2010.

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