Word: constructive
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...proposed ways of dealing with the danger are to fill in the pond, to drain the pond, to construct a fence around the pond, or to radically alter the landscape around the pond. Gruson had no comment on the probability of any of these being adopted...
With that dismaying image, Hugh Thomas' "pursuit of freedom" through 200 years of Cuban history has come full circle. Thomas is a historian of catholic curiosity who can construct engrossing narrative even from the balance sheets of 19th century sugar mills. To prepare his 1,696 pages of history, politics and anecdote, he has visited Cuba repeatedly. He seems to have talked to everybody not dead or in jail, and read everything, even all of Fidel Castro's speeches. As in his 1961 study of the Spanish Civil War, he seems scrupulously fair. The book furnishes...
...Involvement is to record, in cool temper and spare style, how that hodgepodge developed into the Viet Nam War. The authors are Marvin Kalb, CBS diplomatic correspondent, and Elie Abel, his former NBC rival, now dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. They have combined scholarship legwork to construct this useful chronology. They also offer a thesis: that the Viet Nam War is not an aberration but part of the "inexorable progression" of past misconceptions and blunders, including the desire to bolster France, the general goal of containing Communism, and finally a specific fear of the Chinese...
...book's author, New York Times reporter J. Anthony Lukas, refuses to believe in the barricades, and as a result, his book confidently crosses and recrosses generational divides, geographical locales and political boundaries to construct a thickly textured facsimile of the beginnings of this nation's present civil war. By recording the growth of ten lives. Lukas provides portraits of a group of radical leaders-as well as a few less radical losers-coming of age in the America of the early and middle sixties. His often disparate material coalesces into a whole because the events that keep reoccurring throughout...
...item viewed in a dark theatre by a passive, alienated mass, film already constitutes a mystical, reified object, a spectacle that obscures the conditions of its production: that it is man-made, that it isn't a Larger-than-Life-Reflection-of-Reality, that it is merely a celluloid construct. The Hollywood artistry Petri employs, and the Ideology of Ambiguous Truth he promotes, reinforce the perverse relation between the audience and their fetishized entertainment commodity, his film becomes an exciting, confusing, reassuring, self-inclusive Reality: an Artistic Whole, fascinating, hence demobilizing. Investigations of a Citizen Above Suspicion, with its metonymical...