Word: desert
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...took me until I had earned my Ph.D., reached middle age and read your Essay "The Big Puzzle: Who Makes What and Why" [June 13] to decide to desert a profession I'm good at and one I love-teaching...
Dirt-poor Djibouti is a New Hampshire-sized chunk of harsh, heat-seared desert and mountains populated by roughly 220,000 people, mostly impoverished nomads whose average cash income is less than $50 a year. Djibouti comes to independence, after 115 years of French rule, with only three college graduates, no industry other than a pair of soft-drink plants, no agriculture whatever and an export trade restricted to hides and skins (goats outnumber people by better than 2 to 1). "If it were anywhere else," says an Arab diplomat in Djibouti town (pop. 140,000), "nobody would care about...
...variety of that domain is nearly infinite. Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, one of the westernmost, boasts a steaming crater, a heat-blasted desert and flows of black lava that lead down to the warm Pacific off the island of Hawaii. Acadia National Park is as green as Hawaii Volcanoes is barren. Cool, thickly forested hills march down to the Atlantic off the coast of Maine, where the water is icy enough to turn the hardiest of swimmers as blue as the summer sky in a matter of minutes...
...goes Newfield's script. He keeps compounding the felons until, surrounded by nothing but villainy, the reader grows weary and even skeptical. Substandard hyperbole ("We realized that behind almost every horror stood a banker") and doctrinaire populism ("They are making a desert and calling it a balanced budget") further reduce the authors' credibility. Invective obscures insight. John Lindsay was not merely an inadequate mayor but "a volunteer cuckold of the permanent government." The clubhouse crowd is condemned as "back-room dreck," though in fact it produces some good administrators...
...mobbed. Says the Texas-born prima inter pares star of TV's Charlie's Angels: "The spontaneity is gone. We used to be able to fly to Las Vegas for a night. Now if we want to go away we have to rent a place on a desert island as Mr. and Mrs. Doe." Los Angeles Author Nicholas Meyer, also 30 and a new millionaire, finds that his loot has made little difference to his life. Despite the immense success of his two Sherlock Holmesian pastiches, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (he also scripted the film...