Word: aridity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...pine with an adze. And here was little Wells, earnest, honest, conceited, describing in his falsetto voice the British conception of a Secialist Utopia of semidetached villas with a pot of geraniums in each window. When the interview ended and our hero strutted out, Lenin gave one of his arid chuckles and said to Trotsky: 'Ah, the little bourgeois; ah, the little bourgeois!' That...
Another sweeping promise of the Mexican revolution was agriculture-land for the landless and food for all. Yet half a century later, less than one-tenth of the country's acreage is under cultivation, much of it in the semi-arid north and much of that belonging to the controversial ejido collectives. Peasants are guaranteed a plot of land, but the farms are small, dry and often uneconomic, rarely exceeding twelve acres. Peasant families have trouble feeding themselves, to say nothing of providing food for a nation whose population grows by 3.5% annually...
Some Palestinian tells are 70 ft. thick and contain dozens of different layers of debris. Obviously little can be learned about them by looking only at their surfaces; they are the proper hunting grounds of diggers, who work back through the slow accretion of years. But in arid regions, where the tells are bare of vegetation, they erode faster, and the desert wind carries their dust away. In Jordan and southern Palestine there are tells that have worn to ground level. Only their potsherds have survived, all ages and types mingled together, their edges rounded like pebbles on a beach...
...medieval bestiaries, the habits of birds, beasts and reptiles proclaimed the glory of God. In this strange and fitful collection of short stories, Italian Author Tommaso Landolfi has created a kind of 20th century bestiary in which the animals speak not to the godhead in man but to the arid reaches of the human heart...
...year ago, when they left Rio de Janeiro for their "duty stations" in a long, arid river basin 500 miles away, the volunteers were advised to look up the local officials of the Commissao do Vale do Sao Francisco (CVSF). The CVSF, a federal agency charged with developing the river basin, was supposed to supply Brazilian technician counterparts to the volunteers in each station...