Word: frontier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hardy farmer who forged the American frontier in the 19th century had 40 acres of land, a mule and a couple of good milk cows. But that was in the days before rent-a-cow. Instead of spending up to $2,000 to buy a dairy cow, some 300 U.S. farmers have turned to the Quality Holstein Leasing company of Tennessee Colony, Texas, the Hertz for cattle, where they can rent a cow for as little...
Some hugely successful novels have spawned a curious mass-market samizdat that differs sharply from the writings of dissidents. The newest underground hit is At the Last Frontier, a trashy historical novel by Valentin Pikul about Grigori Rasputin, the sexy, self-styled holy man who held the Russian imperial family in thrall. Originally published in the magazine Our Contemporary, which has a circulation of 300,000, the novel caused a sensation as much for its scenes of debauchery as for its virulent antiSemitism. Unfavorable reviews, which criticized the book for its non-Marxist attitudes and hostile treatment of Jews, merely...
...picket signs say) that has more thoughtful and respectable proponents. The New Republic's columnist, TRB, a voice of intelligent liberalism, writes with some truculence: "Sooner or later, America must face reality. It is going to be painful ... The trouble is that huddled masses need jobs. The American frontier (worse luck) is gone." The American ideal of endless hospitality and refuge presupposed perpetually expanding resources. Now, says the argument, an emerging order of scarcity mandates self-interest, selectivity, limitation, exclusion. No more the profligate America with arms open in Whitmanesque embrace, ready to issue a shovel to anyone strong...
...world knows that Hollywood's Pleistocene period was the dawn of popular art. According to Historian Kevin Brownlow, it was also the sunset of the movies' frontier spirit. "Pioneers are people of exceptional energy-a quality that sets them apart," he begins. The narrative that follows is a valedictory to the singular men and women who invested and finally squandered those ergs when the hills and plains of Hollywood were still uncharted territories...
Shepard has the gift of language, which rescues the sledgehammer style of his message. The slang tumbles across the stage like a wild Western river, thoughts as big as the countryside: "You look like forty miles of rough road," says Weston to his son. The frontier reduces life to its primal elements, revealing raw humanity, a force as powerful and perverse as the worthless farm the characters inhabit...