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Crack a Peter De Vries novel at random and you are likely to find a Midwesterner trying just a little too hard to keep from making a fool of himself among the sophisticates of the Northeast. The journey from Pocock, Ill., to Decency, Conn., has been played forward, backward and sideways, sometimes strictly for laughs and often, as in The Blood of the Lamb, to illustrate that comedy is not the opposite of tragedy but its Siamese twin...
Viet Nam, small and remote and poor, translated into an enormous presence in the American imagination. A backward agricultural country became the theater of one of the great psychodramas in American history. America absorbed Viet Nam into itself. The war brought into brutal view the discrepancies of social class that Americans have always preferred to maintain as a kind of dirty half-secret. Viet Nam was, for America, essentially a class war. The children of the poor and the lower middle class tended to do the fighting. The children of the privileged tended to get draft deferments...
...waters and Spanish wine sales in French markets. Efforts to end the deadlock continued through the week. The breakthrough came in a final 16-hour bargaining session led by Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti. The agreement called for a transition period of seven to ten years, allowing the economically backward Iberian countries to adapt to the Community's policies promoting the free movement of workers, capital and manufactured goods...
This is an uncharacteristically earthbound performance for Adams, who until now has needed the limitless expanses of the universe to let him leap backward and forward through space, time and meaning. Still, Fish is the best evidence yet that Adams is not simply a funny sci-fi writer but a bomb-heaving satirist. Consider the spaceship that lands in central London, demolishing Harrods and disgorging a robot that demands, "Take me to your Lizard." On its world, Ford Prefect explains, "the people are people. The lizards are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people...
Signs that Pretoria might be taking two steps backward for every reformist step forward challenged Washington's belief in the Botha government's commitment to real change. Since 1981 the Reagan Administration has steadfastly pursued a line of "constructive engagement," under which the U.S. refrains from openly criticizing the South African regime and hopes instead, through diplomatic pressure and behind-the-scenes negotiation, to coax it toward easing the strictures of apartheid. While making it clear that U.S. policy was not going to change, Washington officials publicly warned that last week's show of force "cannot help prospects...