Word: ending
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Holocaust and other catastrophes of the 20th century invite the term post-apocalyptic. But a world veering toward the 21st century sometimes has an edgy intuition that it is "pre-apocalyptic." Last summer Francis Fukuyama, a State Department planner, resolved the matter peacefully. He published an article proclaiming the "end of history," a result of the worldwide triumph of Western liberal democracy. Hence this is the posthistoric age, a fourth dimension in which the human pageant terminates in a fuzz of meaningless well-being. Intellectuals sometimes nurture a spectacular narcissism about the significance of the age they grace...
Opponents charge that a disaster during launch could spew large amounts of radioactive fallout throughout Florida and cause 2,000 cases of lung, bone and liver cancer. The danger, they say, does not end with a successful takeoff. To gather momentum, the Galileo spacecraft will first make a swing around Venus and two around the earth before hurtling off to Jupiter. Critics are concerned that the vehicle could collide with the earth during close flybys...
...Cliff's only connection to Judah -- until the concluding sequence of this thematically unified but somewhat bifurcated movie -- is through Ben, another rabbi (Sam Waterston), who is one of Cliff's brothers-in-law. The rabbi is Judah's patient, and his eye trouble is quite literal; by the end of the movie he has gone blind. But this blindness is also symbolic. By visiting this affliction on the only character in his movie who has remained close to God, Allen is suggesting that if the Deity himself is not dead, then he must be suffering from severely impaired vision...
...neither Judah's guilty musings on his own crimes -- and he does exhibit a strong desire to be caught and punished -- nor decent Cliff's frantic quest for some kind of fulfillment can awaken heaven's sleeping eye, then what in this world can? If Manhattan, coming at the end of the '70s, was Woody Allen's comment on that decade's besetting sin, self-absorption, then this is his concluding unscientific postscript on the besetting sin of the '80s, greed. At times the joints in the movie's carpentry are strained, at times the mood swings jarring. But they...
...West. Last week alone some 8,200 fled, raising the total number of refugees over the past five months to 50,000. Some jumped at the opportunity without a moment's hesitation, others agonized over it. "We talked about it way into the night for days on end," said Christiane Weinbauer of Halle, who joined the exodus with her husband last week. "One minute we had decided to go, and the next we were staying for the sake of our relatives or the children or for reasons of security. Then we heard on a West German radio station that...