Word: bomb
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Johnson, head of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, told a Senate space subcommittee that ARPA is spending $1,000,000 on a wild-blue-yonder project designed to fly a 1,000-ton manned platform through space by baby A-bomb nuclear power. Not long ago, said he, the project was called "screwball"-but it "looks a little less screwball...
...rubble-strewn Szczecin (formerly Stettin) towering cranes on six miles of rebuilt docks load and unload freight at the annual rate of 4,000,000 tons. In Wroclaw (formerly Breslau) bright new arc lights along the main streets have ended years of dim nights in the city's bomb-shattered center. After years of neglect, Poland's "western territories," the lands east of the Oder and Neisse Rivers taken from Germany after the war, are slowly emerging from postwar desolation...
...novel's hero is a young St. Petersburg philosophy student, Nikolai Apollonovich, who has got mixed up with a seedy revolutionary gang and has committed himself to planting a bomb. The trouble is that the target is his own father -an elderly, rich and humorless bureaucrat just below Cabinet rank and a champion of the Czarist regime. His much younger wife has left him; his son despises him, and most people fear him, actually, he is a harmless little man whose sole commitment is to the civil service. But it is 1905 and Russia has just taken a beating...
...wrong job. Slight, timorous and flaxen-haired, young Nikolai has goaded himself to an inner state just this side of madness. But when the moment comes, he has neither courage nor hatred enough for his mission. What happens is a tragicomedy of errors-conspirators' notes gone astray, the bomb lost, crashing non sequiturs to a near surrealist plot...
...Biely moves from a fashionable masquerade ball to the roach-ridden headquarters of the revolutionary gang; he works the weather and the face of the chaotic city into his story so firmly that at last they seem as important and ominous as any character in the book. When the bomb finally goes off, it is not so much an exclamation point as a period to a narrative that has told all but judged nothing. Who is to say that the half-mad sad-sack hero really is different from the nihilist leader, or that the civil servant's allegiance...