Word: evens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...omen for living like a wild animal in the steppes around Lake Baikal. His father Yesugei was poisoned by enemies and his widowed mother Hoelun chased away from their tribe with her brood, including her eldest, nine-year-old Temujin. The outcasts ate field mice and marmots even as they fought off thieves out for their horses, the most precious of nomad property. Bitterness cultivated a heart of iron. After a half-brother grabbed a fish he had hooked, Temujin would kill the offending sibling in a hail of arrows. He never showed remorse. His mother was furious...
...other hand, we also have to admit that in the last third of the century, modernism ran out of steam intellectually even as it gathered near dictatorial cultural power. Take the art world, for example: allied with the museums, the mass media and the marketplace, it began to wield, as early as the '70s, in Hilton Kramer's words, "a pervasive and often cynical authority over the very public it affects to despise." We live now in an age of empty "Sensation" (to borrow the title of the recent Brooklyn Museum of Art show) and debate not the subtleties...
...true of literature is true of all the arts now: there are readers of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, there are Michael Crichton's readers, and the twain don't meet. Except, possibly, theoretically in cyberspace. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it right: "Culture follows money." And the money--perhaps even the creative zeal--is now in the new media. A radically reshaped culture is beginning to be created there. We can already begin to see what the generation born with a TV remote in its hand, hip-hop on the CD player and a computer screen in its face will...
...death, in 1169, of his uncle Shirkuh, a one-eyed, overweight brawler in Nur al-Din's service who had become the de facto leader of Egypt. A seasoned warrior despite his small stature and frailty, Saladin still had a tough hand to play. He was a Kurd (even then a drawback in Middle Eastern politics), and he was from Syria, a Sunni state, trying to rule Egypt, a Shi'ite country. But a masterly 17-year campaign employing diplomacy, the sword and great good fortune made him lord of Egypt, Syria and much of Mesopotamia. The lands bracketed...
...shocked Europe, the Pope immediately called a Third Crusade. And although Richard the Lion-Hearted bested Saladin in battle after battle, he could not wrest the Holy City from him, and he returned to Europe. The city, always Islam's third holiest site, became even more central to the faithful. Saladin's family ruled less than 60 years longer, but his style of administration and his humane application of justice to both war and governance influenced Arab rulers for centuries. His tolerance was exemplary. He allowed Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem after its fall. The great Jewish sage Maimonides...