Word: dust
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...comes from, salesmen simply say "Africa." The Lai family's Kee Cheong Ivory Factory boasts in a brochure that it can produce 30,000 ivory bangles, 40,000 necklaces and 100,000 rings every month. In its squalid sixth-floor shop, high-speed drills send up plumes of ivory dust, and tusks registered in Singapore and Sudan are stacked like firewood...
Modern science, a cowboy achievement, paradoxically favors the Indian view of life. Nature is alive. The barest Antarctic rock is crawling with microbes. Viruses float on the dust. Bacteria help digest our food for us. According to modern evolutionary biology, our very cells are cities of formerly independent organisms. On the molecular level, the distinction between self and nonself disappears in a blur of semipermeable membranes. Nature goes on within and without us. It wafts through us like a breeze through a screened porch. On the biological level, the world is a seamless continuum of energy and information passing back...
...five-year-old Noel, whom the Hibbards are in the process of adopting, the future is likely to hold greater challenges. A Pueblo Indian, she suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome as well as prenatal exposure to angel dust and probably cocaine. For a long time she was so sensitive to tactile stimulation that it made her hysterical to walk on carpeting, grass or sand. She has been diagnosed as mildly retarded. With a good mother's militant optimism, Mary says the Hibbard house will make the difference. "All kids need structure," she explains. "But special-needs kids need it more...
Although reading dust-jacket review clips is a filthy habit which I wouldn't encourage in anyone, it was the back of this book which drew me in. (The front cover is incredibly ugly; don't let it deter you.) One of the best of English travel writers (who has also done some exploring of our America, in Old Glory, a fabulous journey down the Mississippi), Jonathan Raban, describes her earlier work as a "romance with America itself, its infinitely possible geography, its license, sexiness, and violence." The description clearly fits this new novel, and romance is a well-chosen...
...When the dust settles on the deal struck between baseball and Pete Rose, it will still be nearly impossible to explain his banishment to the kids who love the game. Rose's bargain was the work of lawyers; its contorted logic was utterly devoid of the simplicity and finality that make the game so refreshing. It was a fine-print compromise that at once allowed Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti to announce that Rose was banned from baseball for life for betting on his own team -- and Rose, an hour later in Cincinnati...