Word: decays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Look around America. Begin with New York City. Observe the filth and decay, the turbulence and misery evoking a Third World capital, the homeless sleeping in the streets, the haze of drugs, the racial hate, the crime, the fear. Look at other large American cities, most of which have some of New York in them. And then recall the phrase the American Century...
Look around America. Observe, even in New York City, alongside the decay and decline, the irrepressible drive, the jackhammer energy, the ambition as high as the builders' cranes, the opportunities as exciting as the turbulent street scenes...
...farmer talking to his neighbor across the stone fence. The vocabulary is stoutly native, rich with Anglo-Saxon nouns whose vowels are strong and round as the hillsides. And, once again the archaeologist, Heaney mines the forgotten caves of English to exhume fine words in their last stage of decay, words like bleb and rath and coign, words shaped in the mouths of Beowulf and Cuchulain...
...deal with than the problems at home. It's more glamorous and exciting when you have Saddam or evil communism as the enemy. It's not that simple when, say, you've got a million heroin addicts, a massive crime problem, poverty, lousy education, no health care, urban decay, alcoholism...
Scarcely a page of The General is free from images of reaction, decay and despair. The strongest character in the book is Bolivar's cigar-smoking mistress, a typical Garcia Marquez macho woman. Not surprisingly, the novel did not sit well with many Latin Americans when it was published last year in its original Spanish. The author's antimythic portrait of Bolivar as a mixed- blood man of the Americas nursing his lost cause offended those who preferred the familiar Europeanized hero prancing on horseback...