Word: authoring
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...soared 40 points. In recent years, however, the stock market has had the blahs, reflecting national uncertainty about the future. This summer the Dow Jones industrial average had already declined 50% from its peak of 1051 in 1973, when adjusted for inflation. Concludes Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, author of The Great Crash, a study of the 1929 debacle: "It would be hard to find any buildup of speculative hubris that would make us as vulnerable as we were...
...mystery of why Rembrandt handled chiaroscuro so masterfully; it was an inborn gift, honed by practice but unteachable. Nobel-prizewinning Physicist Isidor I. Rabi, for one, maintains that Edison could no more have stopped himself from inventing than a born punster can refrain from playing word games. Robert Conot, author of a 1979 biography of Edison, A Streak of Luck, observes that Edison's mind "multiplied devices from a single idea like a dividing amoeba and then compartmentalized the creations and endeavors." He was supremely self-confident; if prevailing opinion was that a device could not be invented, that...
Science fiction is pastoral turned upside down, radiating a nostalgia not for what was but for what could be. Since this mystic longing has increasingly filled the novels and stories of Author Doris Lessing, 59, it is not surprising that she has finally got around to spaceships and galactic travelers; she herself calls Shikasta, her 24th book, "space fiction." This description is accurate enough, but it may mislead some into expecting much less than this dazzling novel actually delivers. Shikasta owes more to Gulliver's Travels and the Old Testament than to Buck Rogers; it is at once...
Most scholars think Aztec cannibalism is firmly documented. Arens disagrees. He says the Spanish and the Aztecs accused one another of cannibalism -a common result of the collision of two cultures-but the Spanish got to write the history books. According to the author, the Spanish were stunned by the sophistication of Aztec culture and desperately needed justification for destroying it. After the Aztecs were destroyed and the slave trade dried up, both the cannibalism theme and the slave trade turned to Africa. "As one group of cannibals disappeared," Arens writes, "the European mind conveniently invented another...
...novels like so many used kleenex on the floor. But his 11th book, The Ghost Writer, would not be lightly tossed aside. It delves into the mind of a Jewish writer and surfaces only after revealing the harsh compromises that must be made to attain great stature as an author. One imagines Roth secreting himself one night in I.B. Singer's bedroom closet all the while scribbling a short story about what he sees. In the morning he discovers in his lap a small masterpiece, part autobiography, part fancy; but it is the whole truth about the Jewish fiction writer...