Word: capes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Michael K, the hero of this fearful fable, is a South African of unspecified color. A gardener in a Cape Town public park, he has a harelip and a reputation for feeblemindedness that mask his true nature: he is a man as meek and lowly in heart as a latter-day Messiah. Coetzee calls him "the obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy." As his life and times unfold, it becomes clear that his prodigiousness lies in his ability to continue to celebrate life in the midst of the most malignant chaos...
When war strikes, Michael K flees burned-out Cape Town on foot, wheeling his sick mother Anna in an improvised wheelbarrow. Their ordeal is infernal. Hounded by the police and by thieves, the pair get as far as a hospital, where Anna dies. Michael K is stripped of his money; all he has left is a cardboard box filled with his mother's ashes. Undeterred, he moves on to the place of his dreams, the abandoned farm on the arid South African tablelands of the Karoo, where his mother was born. There he scatters Anna's ashes...
...much of it derives from blunders and accidents. Bartholomeu Dias' maps all showed that there was no ocean route around Africa. It was only after he had been driven off course by a storm in February of 1488 that he found he had somehow rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and that there was a cape to be rounded...
...portrayed by the playwright Sam Shepard, Yeager stands above the rest. His humility, perseverance and courage imply that even someone not lionized by the media may just possess all the right stuff as well. And the movie's reluctance to abandon Yeager, even after the rest have headed to Cape Canaveral, reveals Kaufman and Wolfe's sympathies: the success of programs like Project Mercury are due in large part to men like Yeager...
DIED. Kurt Debus, 74, German scientist who was director from 1952 to 1974 of NASA'S Cape Canaveral facility (now the Kennedy Space Center), overseeing such landmark projects as the launches of the first U.S. manned spaceflight and Apollo 11 's moon mission; of a heart attack; in Cocoa, Fla. Debus worked closely with Wernher von Braun, the father of modern rocketry, to design the Nazis' V-2 rocket booster, then became a passionately loyal American cit izen after the German surrender. In the 1950s he worked on the Army's first missile capable of carrying and delivering a nuclear...