Word: disasterously
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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The film stars Jane Fonda as a television news reporter for a Los Angeles station who wants desperately to break out of fluffy features and into hard news. Jack Lemmon plays the supervisor of a nuclear plant's control room and Michael Douglas plays the free-lance cameraman who secretly...
Jazz musicians of Byard's generation found a variety of ways to cope with the lean years of the late '60s and the rampant commercialism of the '70s music scene. A very few were lucky enough to retain some following without compromising their musical ideals. Many were forced to resort...
One explanation for this disastermania: it is merely a harmless byproduct of popular entertainment. Explains Science Writer Isaac Asimov: "Hollywood just happens to be very good at special effects, primarily destructive effects." Indeed, in a forthcoming book, A Choice of Catastrophes, the polymath popularizer seeks to soothe anxieties about global...
Some scholars think that this kind of writing may be a reflection, rather than a cause, of the preoccupation with disaster. Roy Peter Clark, an English professor at Auburn University, links the spread of millenarian fever with the approaching end of a true millenium-the year 2000. Says he: "We...
Art Historian Andrée Conrad sees disastermania in sociological terms. In a recent review of 20 catastrophe books for the quarterly Book Forum, she argued that disaster writing and entertainment are safety valves for hostility toward a complicated culture. Says Conrad: "For one exhilarating and guilt-free moment, the...