Word: aires
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...humble car owner does not really understand hybrids (engineer jargon for automobiles that use more than one source of power-like a diesel engine combined, with a battery-powered engine, for example). What he really wants is a decent replacement for his air-conditioned, 8-m.p.g. '71 Chevy Impala. He was pretty disappointed when the so-called Moodymobile raised hopes and made headlines by getting from Florida to Washington, D.C., at 84 m.p.g. only to flunk its EPA emissions test...
Feeling fairly gloomy, the car owner ambles by the Minnesota entry again. He wonders aloud about a row of plastic tabs placed at odd angles just above the rear window of a Plymouth Volare. "Vortex generators," explains a student. The little tabs cause turbulence in the air as it passes over the car, reducing "drag" and saving fuel. "Wanna see another innovation?" pipes another student from under the hood. "How 'bout this clothespin holding on the accelerator cable...
...women have spent up to $6,000 apiece at so-called implant clinics. The hair is really thousands of colored strands of polyester or modacrylic fiber, usually in bunches of three to eight strands.* The fibers are threaded into the scalp by needle or forced in by air guns and sometimes anchored below the skin with knots...
...discontents were no longer a set of Freudian trampolines for a spry intelligence; the escape from solemnity required a more studied effort. Oddly, Roth's most exciting work of the '70s remains relatively unknown: two long stories first published in American Review. In On the Air, a talent agent named Lippman attempts to book Albert Einstein as radio's first Jewish Answer Man, only to find that the road to Princeton is a gauntlet of murderous anti-Semites. Looking at Kafka began as a critical essay and gracefully unfurled into a fantasy in which Kafka...
...comes dangerously close to unimaginable Holocaust humor. It is funny and embarrassing at the same time, a God-forbidden break in decorum that allows the anarchic spirit out for a breath of air. Roth has always excelled at this, and if the reader is offended, The Ghost Writer strongly suggests that it is not the author's problem.-R.Z. Sheppard