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When a writer achieves international renown, translators and publishers work overtime spreading all of the new celebrity's good words. This commendable practice has an unsettling side effect: careers can appear to run backward. The case of Italian Author Italo Calvino is instructive. His reputation grew from such cerebral narratives as Cosmicomics (1968) and Invisible Cities (1974); before long, Calvino's name was being bracketed between those of Borges and Nabokov in the fabulists' Hall of Fame. When Italian Folk Tales was translated and published in the U.S. in 1980, Calvino's exquisitely simple retellings...
...Third World. He understands the intangible clash of cultures that accompanies the application of Western ways to primitive societies. His books, both novels and journalistic travel accounts, offer a melange of modernity and mysticism which captures the cultural dislocation development has brought to the world's more backward corners...
SWITZERLAND in the middle ages had an image problem. The rest of Europe saw the Swiss as a backward, uncultured group. The only thing they seemed to be good at was slaughtering large portions of whatever nation's army happened to traverse their rocky frontiers. They were such good fighters, in fact, that in the days before chocolate and watches the confederation's main export was the mercenary armies they hired out to shore up the troops of nations that had given up trying to conquer the Swiss...
...couple of centuries after repelling their last would-be attacker Switzerland presents a different face to the world. Far from being backward, it is now one of the most modern and attractive nations in the world. From an economy based on exporting soldiers, the Swiss have diversified to become a provider of expensive manufactured goods as well as the world's premier bankers. If there was ever a nation that could be described as a bastion of capitalism, Switzerland...
...unique design makes the X-29A as skittish as a colt. "It's roughly like throwing an arrow backward," says Robert Roemer, head of the X-29A project for Grumman. "No human could handle the multitude of adjustments necessary to keep this bird in stable flight." So three computers do the work for the pilot, making 40 adjustments a second to the wings and canards to keep the plane from ripping apart. In effect, the pilot guides he plane by feeding directions into the computer. If all the computers were to fail, the X-29A would self destruct...