Word: central
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...qualitive capability for significant mental anguish and pain, and the animals' dependence on humans (as a result of circumstances created by humans), for example--animals may indeed be considered equivalent to humans. Yet the relative significance of the lives of different species of animals need not be the central question; rather, one must question the extent to which this significance can, has been, and continues to be manipulated to justify or legitimize the unethical treatment of animals. Unfortunately, Sharfstein disregards this central question...
...president of my adolescence all the way to my first tenuous steps into adulthood. As the child of liberal parents, I had soberly assessed the possiblities of a religious-right wing autocracy and found it likely, not to mention the likelihood of my life ending in a ditch in Central America...
...quality of thought and prose, and one has the makings of a Man of Letters -- a quaint designation in this era of celebrity scribes, but valid nevertheless. Wilson's formal structure and traditional style indicate an impatience with the sort of contemporary fiction that makes its own creation a central concern. What matters to him is the contradictions of human nature and the religious impulses that seek to understand the desires of the flesh and the spirit...
These are the central players in what evolves from a surface entertainment into a deceptively rich and complex novel about coming of age (if not about the age itself). Julian's story brims with figures and rituals familiar to British fiction: barmy relatives, eccentric aristocrats, a public school -- the "English Gulag" -- where the headmaster enjoys hitting boys with sticks. As a teenager, Julian spends a summer in Brittany, where French is taught by Mme. de Normandin and sex by her daughter Barbara. Later, while trying to avoid work in the army, he learns another of life's essential lessons...
Bundled in gray garbage bags, 100 young men from Central America spend the night dozing against the brick wall of an Immigration and Naturalization Service center in Harlingen, Texas. On a muddy field in nearby Brownsville, 75 families endure a driving rainstorm crouched under plastic sheeting. At an abandoned hotel, children shiver around wood fires and try to sleep in cold, gutted rooms under mounds of donated blankets. By official estimate, at least 5,000 refugees from war and deteriorating economies in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala have been stranded in South Texas since the INS last month directed...