Not anymore: "Militancy has pushed us almost a decade backward in education," he said.
Even here, however, differences fade as both authors show a keen sense of context, the way two decades reach backward and forward and Hollywood repeats itself with variations.
Andrew Sean Greer's 2004 novel, "The Confessions of Max Tivoli," quite brilliantly fulfilled the difficult task it set itself — to show the life of a man born old, who over the decades grows backward into infancy and, finally, nonexistence.
Consider the decades going backward from 2008: The improbable winner in 1998, the year after Woods's 12-stroke victory in his Masters professional debut, was Mark O'Meara, Woods's neighbor, good friend and mentor.
By John Updike Andrew Sean Greer Andrew Sean Greer's 2004 novel, "The Confessions of Max Tivoli," quite brilliantly fulfilled the difficult task it set itself — to show the life of a man born old, who over the decades grows backward into infancy and, finally, nonexistence.
The election upsets the power hierarchy in Turkey, a secular democracy whose citizens are Muslims, by opening up the presidency — an elite secular post that was first occupied by this country's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — to a new class of reform-minded leaders from Turkey's provinces, for decades considered backward by the elite.
He goes on to describe how global treaty negotiations have been unproductively framed around limiting the rise in temperature in the coming decades by working backward to present-day emission targets and timetables.
Politicians win elections in India by promising to bestow this one-time curse, which has led to a dramatic expansion in those considered backward decades after the designation had true economic meaning.
Over decades the original "backward classes" have been joined by many better-off castes in politically motivated moves that have discredited the quota system, as well as reducing its effectiveness.
