Word: brutishness
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...Each story is cast in the form of a review of a nonexistent book. Lem, of course, is both reviewer and conceiver of the unwritten texts. Some are fairly straightforward social and literary satires. Les Robinsonades dismisses Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a puritanized fiction based on a brutish factual account of a castaway (which it was), and presents a New Robinson who is not nostalgic for a lost culture. He re-creates his world from scratch, dreaming into being a manservant named Snibbins and a three-legged female companion called Wendy Mae. The course of true creation never...
...habilis live? The fossil record, notes Leakey, provides a skeleton key. But the lifestyles of primates, and of such modern-day primitives as the Kung and the Eskimos, offer more elaborate clues. For one thing they suggest that the existence of earlier man was not, as previously supposed, nasty, brutish and short. Gatherer-hunters, says Leakey, led a shrewd, uncompetitive life and spent little time on the hunt. What truly separated them from their relatives the chimps and baboons, however, was not their intelligence but their generosity. "Sharing, not hunting or gathering as such, is what made us human," writes...
Phonies or not, many anchors lead professional lives that are nasty, brutish and short. Maury Povich left Washington's WTTG 18 months ago for a $70,000 anchor spot at WMAQ in Chicago, quit after a year over a salary dispute, signed on with Los Angeles' KNXT for $150,000, was fired six months later during a ratings slump, and is now looking for work. "They put their guts on the line every day, and they know that if the ratings fall they could be gone just like that," says WBBM Station Manager David Nelson, snapping his fingers...
Even some prison authorities concede life in their jails has been nasty, brutish and sometimes short. Says Juan Antonio Antolin, 31, who became director of Santa Marta seven months ago: "This was a pesthole beyond belief. It was run by drug traffickers, not the guards." Antolin claims a Mexican drug peddler offered him $10,000 a week to allow heroin to be smuggled into Santa Marta; when he refused, an attempt was made to kill...
Brooks' perspective on the characters is equally simplistic. Not only does he come very close to making Theresa into a harlot, but he also transforms the men into brutish stereotypes. The heroine's father (Richard Kiley) and first lover (Alan Feinstein) are far less sympathetically drawn than they were in the novel. Theresa's one appealing suitor (William Atherton), whose sweetness should leaven the story, becomes as cruel as the rest. Only the Italian stud Tony, played with magnetic ferocity by Richard Gere, seems remotely human...