Word: boom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Jose Alberto Potuombo is sitting in La Atarraya, the cafe he manages across the street from the great bay, attempting to hear Fidel Castro on his Korean- made boom box. But there are distractions. A crowd is forming on the seawall across the way. "Ven aqui! Ven, mira!" yell the little children, and people are indeed coming and looking. Now there is a crowd of 70, staring down into the water. They laugh, they cheer. Some drivers stop, others honk and yell, "Balseros! Balseros! A Miami! A Miami!" (Rafters! To Miami!) Potuombo scans the scene sourly. "Let the bastards...
Books: Is literature threatened by the recorded-book boom...
Doctorow's dilemma reflects the conflict between purists and realists. Will the popularity of books on tape further erode the interest in reading? Or should we welcome any new literary medium -- even a slightly degraded one like books on tape? One hopeful sign is that despite the boom in audio books, sales of hardcovers and paperbacks have not fallen. Just as Hollywood once feared the advent of videocassettes but later discovered they fed rather than discouraged interest in movies, books on tape may actually promote the cause of literature. Four hours of Doctorow or McCarthy is better than nothing, especially...
...probably couldn't pick David Foster out of a lineup, but if you could, you might want to kiss his ring -- or throttle him on the spot. Foster is a producer of inescapable songs, especially those ultraromantic ballads that seem to blare out of every boom box on the beach. They are sung by various performers, from stars like Whitney Houston to the new group All-4-One, but the songs all bear the unmistakable Foster touch: the soaring vocals, the lush arrangements dripping with strings and keyboards, the crescendos built on crescendos. Whether the sound is timeless or just...
Dozens of companies are rushing to cash in on the boom. They range from Microsoft, which last fall launched a fast-growing line called Microsoft Home that puts out education, entertainment and reference products, to such start- ups as Big Top Productions, a San Francisco software designer with 26 employees that has introduced seven titles since January. IBM too has begun to focus on the kid market with such recent CD-ROM titles as The Book of Shadowboxes: A Story of the ABCs, an introduction to the alphabet. Even such blood-and-guts video-game makers as Sega and Electronic...