Word: bookings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Traditionally the focus of professors' frustration over late book orders, the Coop this year is crediting a new computer system for its improved record in timely text-buying...
...first time around, Sweeney Todd, the gruesome tale of a deranged barber who slits customers' throats and a pragmatic landlady who bakes the victims into meat pies, was a Victorian penny dreadful by way of Brecht. Everything imitated him: Hugh Wheeler's book, Stephen Sondheim's score, Harold Prince's staging and even the set, which resembled an iron foundry; it hissed and clanged of the dehumanization of the Industrial Revolution. Audiences in 1979 flinched at the spewing blood and spoken bile: it seemed there had never been so cynical a musical...
...good way to catch a reader's attention is to start off with a bang. This book does so. Chapter 1, first sentence: "The most perilous work in America is the harvest by hand of sugarcane in South Florida." Holy mackerel, stop the presses! A lot of coal miners will certainly be relieved to learn this, not to mention scads of military test pilots. And just how perilous is this work, which is principally performed by laborers brought in from the Caribbean? An answer is tucked in at the end of a paragraph 245 pages later...
...exceptions -- ties are permitted after twelve innings -- the Japanese play baseball by American rules. It's been that way since 1873, when the game was introduced in Japan and soon became the national obsession as well as the national sport. Yet as journalist Robert Whiting notes in his new book You Gotta Have Wa (Macmillan), the style and, most important, the mind- set of baseball in Japan differ dramatically from those in America. Japan and the U.S., concludes Whiting, are two countries separated by a common sport...
Whiting's book offers an unobstructed knothole through which to view the peculiarities of Japanese baseball and the Americans who struggle to play it. But a larger point also slides home to the reader. If Americans and Japanese cannot see eye to eye on baseball, how can they understand each other on such issues as trade? The answer is evident from this book: they are not yet able...