Word: blight
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...Tarbox. The place is called Greenwood this time. And John Updike presents no magic circle of friends to be destroyed by adultery and the blight of gratified desire as he did in Couples. All that the author seems to have up his sleeve is a couple of pairs, one of your everyday unbalanced domestic quadrangles, in fact. Jerry loves Sally Mathias-and Ruth Conant, but is married only to Ruth. Sally loves herself and Jerry-but is married to Richard Mathias. Richard, who sees himself as "a teacher of worldliness," once had a brief, slick affair with Ruth...
Poverty Warriors. How, after all the TV documentaries, after all the "poverty warriors" from the best bureaucracies in Washington and the VISTA volunteers-after all those good intentions and all that matching money -can Caudill's Appalachia be more of a blight today than it was a decade ago? The villain of Caudill's piece is the coal industry: "backward, brutish, medieval," controlled by "industrial Neanderthals." Caudill contends the industry has corrupted the American political system from the county courthouse to the state capital to the halls of Congress with what he scathingly refers to as "contributions...
Typically, the city has a growing blight of porn shops and very blue movies. Parts of the black ghetto are spreading into decaying white neighborhoods, and unemployment is high among the city's Latinos and blacks. Yet Grand Rapids also boasts cultural accouterments that would be the envy of many a larger city: a fine symphony orchestra, directed by Spanish-born Theo Alcantara, a ballet troupe and a civic theater. Jerry and Betty Ford buy season tickets, but they are used by his half brothers, Jim, an optometrist, and Richard, who works as manager for the Ford Paint...
...Locust) and Screenwriter William Goldman (All the President's Men) are not content with making an espionage yarn. They have tarted up their story with phony resonances intended to link it to such things as war guilt, the Nazis and the Jews, McCarthy witch-hunting, and the blight of urban decay as emblematic of modern anomie. Thrillers can deal fleetly with ideas, even difficult ones...
Industrialization and the growth of cities have already brought attendant blight: air pollution, traffic congestion, billboarded highways and garish fast-food enterprises. To Southern Journalist John Egerton (The Americanization of Dixie), "The modern, acquisitive, urban, industrial, post-segregationist, on-the-make South, its vices nationalized, its virtues evaporating if not already dissipated, is coming back with a bounce in its step, like a new salesman on the route, eager to please, intent on making...