Word: desert
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Before the Americans left Israel, they visited a hillside kibbutz near Jerusalem to hear Opposition Leader Shimon Peres, and talked with Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan over dinner at the Israel Museum. Then they flew deep into the Sinai desert to hear Israeli Defense Minister Ezer Weizman during a luncheon at a forward airbase. Next day, after going on to Egypt, the group crossed the Suez Canal as a guest of the Egyptian Second Army, saw the wrecked Bar-Lev line and toured Egyptian fortifications...
Some of the best poetry appears in the middle section of the book, "Desert." It is here that Tamsen's willingness begins to bitter. The impossibility of the odds finds expression in paradox: "we age in the youngest canyon; we fumble through/the same impassable passage." Hope finds outlet in dreams, signs and visions: a rainstorm on the ocean; a mirage of fellow travelers. Rock formations and vegetation come to stand for futility: "the children chase [Tumbleweed]/as though they were chasing/hoops or balls/the rootless chasing the rootless...
...Fonda's character, is also a bit overdrawn. At the outset, she is an incredibly naive, submissive spouse to the Marine career man. She doesn't seem to have changed much since high school, where her yearbook inscription read: "What is the one thing Sally would want on a desert island? A husband." Gradually, awakened by her experience in the veteran's hospital and by the feminist roommate she moves in with, a new consciousness emerges. She sheds her prudish dresses and skirt outfits for jeans and imported shirts, becomes increasingly anti-war, and eventually falls in love with Voight...
...sculpture from all the hack carvings littering the steps of a hotel for white tourists..." And when Castle tucks Sam into bed, he thinks: "He looked more African than his mother, and the memory of a famine photograph came to Castle's mind--a small corpse spread-eagled on desert sand, watched by a vulture." It's as if, the triumph of liberation forces having made it impossible for Greene's characters to go to colonialism, Greene is now bringing colonialism home to his characters...
...inspired by history or geography. The medieval herb garden, for instance, is complete with a bay tree surrounded by soft green turf. In the topiary garden, a hippo, giraffe, elephant and camel-sculpted in glossy English ivy-recall the playful conceits of Pliny's Rome. The American Desert House is studded with 100 kinds of desert plants, including a 20-ft. saguaro cactus. Children may prowl the Greenmuse, a special section with a "please touch" policy to give city kids an acquaintance with the look and feel of real corn and tomato plants. Beneath the conservatory, in the Green...