Word: backwards
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...owned by descendants of German and Scotch-Irish immigrants who cleared and settled their way across Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana, out onto the prairie. If you are talking history in McLean County, you are talking about a place that has achieved its destiny, and now has time for a backward look. The traveler discovers the pathos of the conquest of the prairie sod, and romance in the development of hybrid corn by the Funk Brothers Seed...
...Shah systematically dismantled the judicial system of Iran and the country's guarantees of personal and social liberties. His regime consistently violated the codes of law and justice, destroying the dignity of our people by treating them like backward savages to be pulled with an iron hand out of the middle ages into the light of the modern era. Nearly every source of creative, artistic and intellectual endeavor in our culture was suppressed...
...This is the first book I've written that I've felt under no time pressure to finish," he said at a reception after the reading. "I frequently start 200 pages into the novel, then work backward from the ending. I always begin with an epilogue and then struggle with the middle which usually comes slowly...
Grossman harbors a revisionist belief: technology retards productivity by ultimately robbing people of creativity. "The new office technology is a step backward. The worker gets bored as hell with what he is doing. A person used to sit down and type a letter and identify with it. Now we put it into one big damn machine, change a few words and produce 100 or 1,000 different letters. We have dehumanized a lot of things...
Nevertheless, Theroux includes some passable anecdotes, like one on the inappropriate naming of South American cities: "None of the Lagunas Verdes was green...Progreso in Guatemala was backward; La Liberated in El Salvador, a stronghold of repression in a country where salvation seemed in short supply." And his descriptions of the class stigmas on the trains and his interview with Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges are superb...