Word: agee
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dubin is ultimately a coward--one more sympathetic to his plight (and nearer his age) might call him very human?--but in the end the book is wearing. He obviously sees himself as likable (as does Malamud), but it becomes harder and harder to understand why. The problem is that the book becomes too much like Dubin--one of those people who draw you into their lives with the message, "I can change, I want to change, all I need is for you to believe in me, love me and I will change." And it ends with Dubin sneaking...
...teachers to spank children in school, thinks Yale Psychologist Edward Zigler, sets an example for institutional abuse, an offense that is even more widespread than abuse by parents. The business of child pornography flourishes. In Los Angeles the police estimate that 30,000 children, many of them under the age of five, are used each year as objects of pornography. A number of them are actually sold or rented for the purpose by their parents. Perhaps both child abuse and child pornography can be regarded as merely aberrational; some child abuse is actually a bent expression of too much caring...
...seemed born to hurdle. He has the ideal build (6 ft. 1 in., 170 Ibs.), a sprinter's speed, exquisite balance and lightning reflexes. "But the mental aspect is what sets him above the rest," says Frank Costello, the Maryland track coach. "He has unbelievable maturity for his age. He's the ultimate competitor, and that's something you can't teach...
Indeed, Armageddon is something of a growth industry. In an avalanche of recent books, polar caps melt, a new ice age begins, the oceans disappear, the ozone level is destroyed, terrorists touch off a nuclear war, astronauts bring back a deadly Andromeda Strain. Destruction may also come from a maddened god (Gore Vidal's Kalki). Or in an unending snowstorm (George Stone's Blizzard). Or from the scorching "greenhouse effect" of too much CO2 in the atmosphere (Arthur Herzog's Heat). Or through global political disintegration (The Third World War: August 1985 by a group of English...
...Leach, a man obsessed by a horrific memory. As a child of five, he had witnessed the hanging of an elephant named Alice, which had gone berserk and killed a little girl. Justice, absurdly satisfied, has left Leach traumatized for life: "That little girl and Alice were the same age ... That's what gets me." In the essay "The Most Kindest Cut of All: Vasectomy," Crews humorously plays with a castration fear. "Suppose," asks his doctor, trying to dissuade him from the operation, "the woman you wanted to marry wanted children of her own and you couldn...