Word: barrens
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CEREMONY IN LONE TREE, by Wright Morris (304 pp.; Atheneum; $4), is set in the barren Nebraska plains country, where the author stalks his favorite game -the "Sears Roebuck Gothic" Midwesterners with souls imprisoned like "buzzing flies" in "God's cocoon." Morris has been compared variously to Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, even Mickey Spillane, but in this, his 13th book, he sounds more like a kind of slick-paper Nathanael West, without that gifted writer's savage humor. His story is wired to the tangled nerve ends of the collection of oddballs and misfits who stumbled...
...Achilles. Percy Randal, the grey old rancher, proud of his sons and his stock-rich kingdom, is clearly Priam. Golden-haired Ellen Lacy, wife of one of Randal's younger rivals, may be no match for Helen, but in the woman-starved region around the Broken S, her barren beauty is "the lodestar for this small galaxy called the Forkhandle country ... ox-eyed and unaware of the magnet her aureate flesh concealed." When the Paris of the piece starts tossing his good looks around, a range war results, friend kills vengeful friend, and fate contrives grim endings...
...small, barren island of Likoma in Africa's Lake Nyasa stands a great cathedral. Built by native Anglican converts a century ago, it was long the center of Anglican missionary work in Nyasaland and a showpiece of transplanted Christianity. Today, huge cracks threaten to bring down the remnants of its walls, and its stained-glass windows hang crazily from their worm-eaten wooden frames...
Real estate is costly in the mountain valley that houses Caracas, but the hill called La Roca Tarpeya, considered too steep for building sites, long stood barren right in the middle of town. Now an ambitious young builder is covering the rock with a cap of concrete and glass to form a spiraling, 25-acre commercial area worth $30 million. Architect Jorge Romero Gutiérrez, 36, calls his project "the helicoid," or spiral. In the two years that construction has been under way, Romero has spent $16.5 million, and last week the helicoid was 60% finished...
...Jose Limon and company offered Barren Sceptre, a ballet treatise (music by Gunther Schuller) on the complicated family life of the Macbeths. The lights had scarcely come up on Macbeth, dressed entirely in black, when a pair of lavender arms sprouted from his shoulders, and presently Lady Macbeth slithered into view. For much of the rest of the piece the two swooped about the stage in convulsive frenzies, occasionally coming together like wrestlers grappling for a hold...