Word: adamancy
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...like a good modern, revering like a good Jew, Wiesel portrays in these essays the majestic figures of the Old Testament rather as if he were writing a memoir about beloved but salty grandfathers and great-uncles from the East Side. Certainly Moses and Cain and Abel and even Adam seem as pungently real to him as the Jews he knew as a child in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In returning to the first Diaspora, the first murder, the first exile, Author Wiesel appears at last to have found a meaning, if not an excuse for the Holocaust he has borne...
...least in matters of conversation-Wiesel does not hesitate to judge their characters. When push comes to shove (and it often does in the Old Testament), he tends to like his piety muscular. He goes so far as to prefer Esau to Jacob, referring to Jacob (as well as Adam) as "a weakling." What he interprets as Job's bland "resignation" to God he calls "an insult to man." Job, he remarks, "should have continued to protest...
...Adam ("singularly uninteresting") and Joseph ("not too appealing a human being") bore and offend him during their palmy days. Only after Adam's expulsion from Eden, only after Joseph's imprisonment do they qualify for his term of respect: "a tragic figure." Happiness, he concludes, is more corrosive than misery. "Work," "strive," "suffer," "begin again" are the verbs of history and the concepts that inspire Wiesel. In the honorable survival of those who have believed, he finds the examples he needs in order to behave and survive today. Messengers of God, finally, is as simple and direct...
...Seychellois, who regard themselves as the happy heirs of paradise lost. One early visitor, British General Charles Gordon, solemnly asserted a century ago that the Garden of Eden was located in the Seychelles, though there are no serpents there. Gordon argued that Eve's gift to Adam was no apple but a coco de mer, an indigenous, double-barreled 40-lb. nut, reputed to have aphrodisiac powers...
Philosophers have argued for centuries about the best means for longs to regulate trade and increase the riches of their kingdoms. But according to this season's new work by Scottish Professor Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London, W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 2 vols.; £! 16 shillings), they are all wrong. The best course for governments is to do as little as possible...