Word: back
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Away with Coffins. Spiraling ramps are not new in architecture. Assyrian King Sargon II wound a 6-ft. ramp around his 143-ft-tall Ziggurat at Khorsabad back in 706 B.C. What Wright did was avail himself of reinforced-concrete shell techniques to stand the structure on its narrower end, cantilever the floors inward, and top off the structure with glass, a material no ancient architect had to use on such a scale...
...exterior proved too much for many critics as well, was dubbed "the snail," an "indigestible hot cross bun," a "wash ing machine." Robert Moses, New York City Parks Commissioner and Metropoli tan Museum ex officio trustee, decided that it looked like "an inverted oatmeal dish." Wright fired back: "It's going to make the Metropolitan Museum look like a Protestant barn." Twenty-one artists signed a round-robin protest charging that Wright's scheme for hanging would throw their canvases askew and the sloping ramp (3%) would provide no level base board for reference. Wright replied that...
Father's Tragedy. Back in Japan, Manabu's father had been a prosperous ferryboat owner and hotelkeeper (the House of Flowers). But when Manabu was seven, father fell on evil times. "A Japanese father never explains business affairs to the family," Mabe recalls, "but I knew something terrible had happened. My father was bankrupt and humiliated." His father tried first being a barber, then finally decided to move to Brazil. The family made the 50-day trip in steerage, and father became a contract laborer on a Sao Paulo coffee plantation...
After Morgan's death in 1943, Henry Alexander went off to war as a vice chairman of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in Europe, came back to begin his swift rise to the top. He became the protege of President George Whitney, who had foresightedly launched a recruiting drive for the young men who later became the bank's postwar bird dogs. Less than ten years after he joined the firm, Alexander was made executive vice president. Following in Whitney's footsteps, he moved up to the presidency in 1950, when Whitney became chairman, took over...
Elsewhere in this collection, Mailer speculates coyly about what future Ph.D. candidates will say of him, shoots back, wadded into spitballs, most of the unfavorable reviews he has received, and reacts with the fury of an upstaged diva to a photograph he considers ill-chosen. In effect, what Mailer has produced is a record of an artistic crackup. By the early 1950s the spare, controlled prose of The Naked and the Dead had turned sour and turgid, and its author was drifting in a haze of liquor, seconal and marijuana. Mailer has stopped using "the minor drugs," he says (although...