Word: decays
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...gloomier metaphor was ever coined to lend a semblance of shape to man's long struggle through history. Cultures, said Oswald Spengler, are limited biological forms of life?like inchworms, like oak trees, like men. Mysteriously born, they inexorably grow old, decay according to discernible pattern and then die. What is more, Spengler insisted, Western culture has already reached the last stages of its allotted life span...
...major cultures: ancient Egyptian, ancient Semitic, Peruvian, Chinese, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Greco-Roman and Western. All had flourished for the same amount of time (about 1,000 years). All showed the same development. By comparing the dead to the living, the historian could tick off the inevitable signs of decay and predict how death would come again...
Pushed from Behind. Mandel writes in this upended fashion. He tells of the mental disintegration of a U.S. mechanized cavalry troop fighting in Germany in 1944, and his soldiers are only a shade more than interchangeable war novel parts. But he describes the branching filaments of their decay with subtle force, and states clearly a proposition that most battle novels fudge: in the insane world of mud, blood and constant gunfire, the normal condition of a combat soldier must be something close to insanity...
...which creates little fallout. Only about 25 megatons came from nuclear fission of uranium or plutonium, and since many of the Russian tests were exploded at high altitudes, their dangerous fission products will presumably stay aloft for longer periods of time and lose more of their activity by natural decay before they come down...
...homeland. But Lawrence distributed his displeasure evenhandedly; he had equally sharp words for the U.S.: "It's so tough and wearing, with the iron springs poking out through the padding . . . Americans are not younger than we, but older: a second childhood. But being so old, in senile decay and second childishness, perhaps they are nearer to the end. and the new beginning." This 1,300-page-thick collection of Lawrence letters, ably edited by Southern Illinois University's Professor Harry...