Word: 1960s
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This year it is Ilya Ehrenburg's turn in the spotlight. Ehrenburg, probably unknown to most Americans only 30 years after his death, was one of the most famous Soviet writers from the 1930s to the 1960s, serving as the USSR's main cultural emissary to the West under Stalin and Khrushchev. While he wrote dozens of novels and books of verse, he became best known as a correspondent for Izvestia and other Soviet newspapers during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, when his fiercely anti-Fascist sentiments made him a favorite of Red Army soldiers...
...predicament was, perhaps, a product of the historical situation of Asian-Americans, as a population of relatively recent immigrants--though that status, too, became part of the stereotype brought down upon thousands of Japanese-Americans in the internment camps of World War II. For Asian-American activists of the 1960s and 1970s, the pressing issue was carving out a unique place in America for the Asian community: the finding of a uniquely American identity, one that was not simply defined by our Orientalness. It was no surprise that writers like Frank Chin turned to black culture as a model...
...symbolic, petit-mal rebellion, negligible in the context of the 1960s. (Or the '90s: writer Pat Jordan once described Franklin as "a nice man dressing to look bad.") But in the moral universe of serious Evangelicalism, it signified something more troubling: a distance from God, or worse, a willful turning away from his face. That is certainly how Franklin understood it. "I prayed and attended church," he says. "But I found the things in the world pleasurable and fun, and I didn't like being around Christian people." He had come to identify full Christian commitment with hated authority...
...earliest pieces in the show, from 1954 to 1957, are terrible--Beat coffee-shop art writ large. What enabled him to become an artist in the 1960s was junk, scraps, the offcuts and excreta of America, which he combined first into small hybrid pieces and then into whole rooms and environments. As a hunter-gatherer, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, he was a whiz. He put in everything, including the kitchen sink--no, make that the whole kitchen. Some of the catalog entries for this show, listing title, date and materials, sound more like small towns than works...
With the Unabomber, we have science employed to derail its own use and technology invoked to crumble technological advances. While the desire for a simpler and more pristine life crosses through all of us, the Unabomber sought changes that would best have been accomplished using means like the 1960s demonstrations and protests. Popular opinion can be swayed by example, and acceptance of views can be peacefully promoted by a smart leader. Some of the Unabomber's ideas have merit. Let's educate the people we wish to influence, not kill or maim them. DONALD C. RIFAS Sacramento, California...