Word: babbitt
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Darrach paints all his characters with rich strokes. Almost too rich, in fact. He describes one U.S. chess official as a "Huckleberry Babbitt," a man whose "pink scalp looks like a ham in mourning." Such vivid excesses might be well placed in a short treatment. But served in book-length bunches, the cumulative effect is a bit like overdosing on chocolate fudge...
Reserve Mining, which is owned jointly by Armco Steel and Republic Steel, produces 15% of the U.S.'s iron ore. It mines taconite around Babbitt, Minn., then ships the flintlike rock 50 miles to Silver Bay, on the shores of Lake Superior. There the iron content of the taconite is extracted, and the wastes, or "tailings," are dumped into the water. Any time that Reserve is attacked for polluting the lake-and the attacks have been continuous since 1967-it says that it might have to close the plant if ordered to stop. That would wreak economic havoc, since...
...ideal solution would be for Reserve Mining to dispose of its wastes on land. But company officials testified that Reserve had no plan for land disposal, and would need time to prepare one. The executives also rejected a Government proposal that Reserve move its entire Silver Bay operation to Babbitt. Such a move would cost $ 187 million, said federal officials. Reserve promptly upped the estimate to $575 million, a figure that Judge Lord scrutinized and then branded as "blatantly inflated." On March 1, an Armco executive admitted that Reserve Mining had in fact prepared four or five on-land disposal...
Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888 into a family stiff with tradition. He was raised on rectitude and duty. His books were carefully selected; the Encyclopaedia Britannica was permitted, but Tom Sawyer was not. At Harvard, Eliot took boxing lessons, fell under the influence of Irving Babbitt, a hard-minded classicist who was one of his professors, and was introduced to the poetry of Jules Laforgue...
...described as "a graduate student of herself; and Rinsler, a cynical organizer for The Movement. A reader soon finds, though, that all three tend to talk (and think) like a John Leonard review. Here is Rinsler inwardly fulminating at "Melville's bourgeois psychodrama ... Ahab as entrepreneur cum zealot ... Babbitt redux; whale oil poured on troubled waters." Groans Marcy enduring the pain of delivery of her baby: "If this is nature, give me artifice...