Word: civilizations
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Gregory Rabassa, the eminent translator and authority on Spanish literature, says Cela "kept the Spanish novel alive during those awful years." That period, of course, encompasses the Spanish Civil War and the wrenching adjustments afterward to the Franco dictatorship. Cela, raised in Madrid by his Spanish father and English mother, was a university student in 1936 when the war erupted. He joined what readers of Hemingway or Orwell will recognize as the wrong side, taking up arms with Franco against the Republic. He continued his education in conflict, hearing the oxymoronic battle cry of some of his fellow soldiers: Viva...
Cela's flippant disdain for authority -- of whatever sort -- earned him the respect of exiled Spaniards who might otherwise have excoriated him for his allegiance in the civil war. In later years his fierce independence won increasing regard. He was among those, after Franco's death, who were asked to write a new Spanish constitution. Beyond that, his best novels, with their violent, poetic hyper-realities, affirmed a tradition that stretches from Cervantes to Gabriel Garcia Marquez...
...eventually adopted twelve infants of different races, accumulating a rambunctious family she called the "Rainbow Tribe." Baker built her career in Europe, partly to escape the humiliations of a racist America; yet her proudest moment was sharing a podium with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1963 civil rights march on Washington...
...solution is less certain in those parts of Africa racked by starvation and civil war, where CITES decisions carry little weight, tourist dollars are nonexistent, and the herds continue to shrink. In Angola and Mozambique, for example, rebels use ivory to help finance military operations. Said a spokesman for Mozambique: "If the war stops, people can live, students can go back to school, and yes, we can save elephants...
...fault that the conflict is not resolved yet," he said, speaking of the struggle between Azerbaijan and Christian Armenia. Kasparov said he doubted a quick solution can be found to religious and ethnic strife there that has killed hundreds, displaced approximately 100,000 and threatened to burst into civil...