Word: extinct
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...FUNNY the way things get jumbled up. Funny when people who one thought were inconsequential prove otherwise, funny when ideas and ways of thinking one thought were extinct except for the analytic books and professors who discuss them surface again unexpectedly, even potently. And it's funny and strange and more then a little wonderful when a writer who has shown talent and yet been a disappointment in the past--and whom seemingly every-one else has lauded to the ends of the earth-creates something genuinely entertaining and even a bit enlightening. John Cheever's new novella. Oh What...
...Show, as much for their genuine bellyachin' humor as for the lost world they recreate. Dan Rice, the homespun clown who dressed up in a flag suit and ultimately inspired the cartoon image of Uncle Sam, peddled a brand of entertainment which--as the show gradually reveals--was virtually extinct by the time of Appomattox. In his heyday--set forth in the show's early vignettes--Rice would cavort while telling his audiences morality stories (each with a twist), browbeat them with "verbatim" scenes from Hamlet and Othello and frequently harangue them about politics. With a freewheeling didacticism few audiences...
...bemused modern reader, John Ruskin is yet another long-gone marvel, a species of featherless biped now extinct. This rare bird, born in 1819, was a gentleman of means and an amateur of genius, whose leisurely travels to Italy and Switzerland resulted in a vast outpouring of noblesse oblige: Sesame and Lilies and Seven Lamps of Architecture and some 30 other volumes instructing his countrymen on how to think about art, man and socialism. His writing now seems overabundant; but in an age when color photography and its reproduction in books were lacking, there was a reason for his word...
...even the beings that have become extinct usually have approximate, living counterparts that Attenborough and his camera crews can pursue, as they snoop, like scientific paparazzi, on the private lives of all creatures great and small. Probably never has any program shown so many forms of courtship and copulation: millipedes writhing in combinations too complicated to comprehend, goggle-eyed newts climbing atop each other, fish defying the hazards of nature to bring sperm to egg, frogs singing hoarse epithalamiums in ponds and swamps. Only fast-flying swifts, which mate on the wing, seem able to escape the prying lens...
...since gone through two reruns, receiving universal praise from British critics. The reason for so much success seems evident; his story is compelling, and he tells it well. In the 13th and final episode, he even draws a moral. If for some reason man should ever become extinct, there is almost certainly some other creature, perhaps too lowly now to be noticed, that would take his place. That, sadly and happily, is the natural order of things...