Word: allene
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bowhead today is a hard-to-find mammal, and so indeed should be a number of writers who blubber over the fate of the whale. But not Everett S. Allen. In Children of the Light, Allen, a New Bedfordman and writer for that town's redoubtable Standard Times, has put together a marvelous book about everything that went into the financing, building and provisioning of whaling ships, the men who sailed and lost them, the "overweening pursuit of wealth" that drove them to riches and ruin. Allen writes poetically but with a naturalist's restraint about the climate...
...Allen's title alludes to the Massachusetts Quakers' view of themselves as a chosen people who assumed "responsibility for economic, political and moral leadership [and] had unflagging faith in the future." Ironically, the Eskimos whose food supplies the whalers had mercilessly decimated also considered themselves the chosen people, and, unlike the whale, have so far survived all the white man's depredations...
...Allen discourses with equal ease about walruses and carpenters, shoes and ships, and, yes, sealing wax, about profits and prophets and peaceful coexistence (the Quakers invented the notion), countinghouses and fo'c'sles. Finally, in a chapter that begins on page 210, this whole sea catalogue reaches the subject announced in the second half of its subtitle: The Rise and Fall of New Bedford Whaling and the Death of the Arctic Fleet...
...Woody Allen's new movie, Sleeper, will be all over the country by the time this column is printed, and it sounds amazing: Among other things, Allen plays Blanche opposite Diane Keaton's Stanley in a weird version of A Streetcar Named Desire; Allen wakes up (or, rather, is defrosted) 200 years in the future...
...selling tickets at $10 each for his intergalactic spaceship ("No warranties expressed or implied"). He says it will take off Dec. 24 before the comet's gases can ignite the earth's oil supply and bring death to most of mankind. UFO Cataloguer and Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who was born under Halley's comet in 1910, is taking a more realistic view; he is bracing himself for a flood of calls at his Northwestern University UFO center from people worried about the fiery space spectacle...