Word: frontierment
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...book to its own, medium-high pedestal. At the most basic level, the novel is a literary reenactment of John Ford's 1956 Western The Searchers, which serves both as a tribute to the Great American cinematic genre of the Western and as a questioning of American notions of frontier and otherness. At another level, the book is a coming-of-age story of a girl's passage into womanhood. Finally, and at a much more interesting level, it is a laudable inquiry of language...
Lethem's portrayal of the colony evokes the dusty, wood-ridden, disorganized towns of the Wild West glorified in the Western film genre. However, the colony also reminds us that these towns constituted an actual frontier for the colonists, a territory uncharted for them in which to institute their conception of civilization from a clean slate. The inter-actions between the Americans of the Archbuilder colony seem so elemental, summon such basic dilemmas and yield such unproductive results that the reader can only wonder why the Wild West was not indeed wilder...
...Loeb University Professor Walter Gilbert '53, left his post as a tenured professor in molecular and cellular biology and set out to stake a claim in the emerging frontier of commercial biotechnology...
Americans visiting Australia--and quite a few do these days--sometimes come with expectations of finding a "last frontier" inhabited by Crocodile Dundee look-alike. A carefully framed tourist schedule can, up to a point, sustain the illusion, but a few days in Sydney or Melbourne will soon out you right. At first you might be struck by a sense of familiarity--what might be called the McDonald's syndrome--but Australia, however receptive it has been to America influences, is a very different society with a different history...
That's the sound of a frontier being breached. The globalization of business and finance has clobbered several Asian economies in the past year, but you hear few people proposing to build up the barriers again. On the contrary: the world of business is now for the worldly like Yan, even those operating in China. "China has done so much damage to itself for 200 years," Yan mourns, "by not realizing the world is larger than it." That's a lesson he learned early--Yan first left China at the age of 17 with a borrowed $26 in his pocket...