Word: dickson
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...WELLS: HIS TURBULENT LIFE AND TIMES by Lovat Dickson. 330 pages. Atheneum...
Alas, the marvels of science so relished by Wells have produced far less than Utopia. Lovat Dickson, formerly an editor and director of Macmillan and Co., Wells' London publisher, cannot quite forgive the man who blithely sold the masses on the future. But he makes clear that Wells was the first gulled victim of his own salesmanship, and that with his extraordinary capacity for hope went an extraordinary capacity for disenchantment. Inside the complacent optimist, a desperate pessimist was signaling wildly...
...Wells did not begin at all ebulliently. He was, in Dickson's words, "a rather sickly young man from the lower class," the son of a housemaid and a failed shopkeeper. After failing himself as a draper's assistant, Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, where Thomas Huxley was teaching biology at the time. It was Huxley who first excited Wells' interest in science. But young Wells' omnivorous curiosity-always subject to other intellectual temptations -was diverted into Fabian socialism, literature and debating. Putting more and more time into...
Wells had flair-an irresistible sweep and bounce. He was a missionary who liked to begin and end sentences with "... if the Race is to be saved." He had, as Dickson points out, "the passionate urge to simplify, to convert." Only one thing was lacking: he didn't care much for people. His vision of the future always reduced itself to an elite world with H. G. Wells in charge...
...community conspires to oust them, the hippies have been setting up well-organized but acephalous communes, with ordinances that prescribe nonviolence and charity. "We're not political," explained Gretchen Dickson, a 17-year-old blonde from Pittsburgh. "We just want to be beautiful." To relieve tension, many hippies have fled higher up into the mountains. But some 10,000 more are expected to pass through Taos this summer as word of its pristine seclusion gets around...