Word: centaurs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...classic cliche, she is her husband's severest critic. "I can't think of one of my novels she's really liked," says Updike. "When she read The Poorhouse Fair, she said, 'Why do you want to write about all those old people? After The Centaur, she said, 'You can't understand all the mythology.' After Of the Farm, she said, 'Nothing happens.' And with Couples, she said she felt that she was being smothered in pubic hair. Actually I did take some...
...four earlier novels-The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit, Run, The Centaur, Of the Farm-were praised, sometimes extravagantly, as the work of a man who was surely destined to write a "major" novel. The trouble was that he was too much the poet, too much the pointillistic stylist, too self-concerned with scenes, images and feelings sensed in a severely limited autobiographical world. He was justly acccused of hiding behind his family and childhood, of not daring the larger, extra-domestic themes that his technical prowess promised, or conversely, of trying to inflate his tiny genre scenes into balloons of cosmic...
...Centaur was a loving tribute to his father, an endearing old-style eccentric in whom Updike sees "the Protestant kind of goodness going down with all the guns firing-antic, frantic, comic, but goodness nonetheless." Though the novel is obscured by unnecessary buttresses of Greek mythology, the portrait of Wesley Updike, in all its wonderful mania, sparkles with life. Wesley Updike is still mentioned in hushed tones in Shillington for his unpredictable teaching methods. One winter day, he suddenly dashed out of, his classroom in the middle of a lesson on decimals. Moments later, he reappeared with a handful...
...wrote off on its Convair jetliners in 1961. Climbing back to its 1961 sales peak of $2 billion, the company last year earned $58 million on sales that were up by 22% to $1.8 billion. Nearly 80% of that comes from Government orders for items ranging from Atlas and Centaur rockets for NASA to Navy surface ships and nuclear-powered attack submarines...
...using an ion engine instead of chemical fuel for deep space acceleration, Stewart believes, scientists will be able to launch outer planet probes with rockets as small as the Atlas-Centaur, or send considerably larger payloads aloft with the Saturn 5. Combined with gravity assists from the planets, the ion engines should allow sophisticated unmanned probes to give man a close look at the outer planets, regions outside the solar system - and even the sun itself...