Word: greats
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...offers. Other happy refrains are sounded and resounded as the essays (averaging only 1,200 words long) tumble forth. He seems bemused by the phenomenon of healthy hypochondriacs. Americans, for example, are needlessly "obsessed with Health." Thomas wonders why, particularly at a time when "we are free of the great infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis and lobar pneumonia, which used to cut us down long be fore our time." Humans are not frail organisms coveted by every death-dealing microbe in the world, as so much pop medicine would have it. Quite the contrary: "We are in real life, a reasonably...
...ghost of an idea how this works, and nothing else in life can ever be so puzzling. If anyone does succeed in explaining it, within my lifetime, I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another, around the whole sky, until all my money runs...
...modern medicine somewhere in the mid-1930s, with the entry of sulfonamides and penicillin into the pharmacopoeia, and it is usual to ascribe to these events the force of a revolution in medical practice. This is what things seemed like at the time. Therapy had been discovered for great numbers of patients whose illnesses had previously been untreatable. Cures were now available. As we saw it then, it seemed a totally new world. Doctors could now cure disease, and this was astonishing, most of all to doctors themselves...
Running alongside the great pipeline, for which it was built, the Alaskan Haul Road stretches 397 miles from Livengood (pop. 25), an old mining town north of Fairbanks, to the bleak oilfields of Prudhoe Bay. Following roughly a parallel course northeastward across similarly unspoiled wilderness, Canada's Dempster Highway extends 465 miles from historic Dawson (pop. 745) in the Yukon to the government-built showcase city of Inuvik (pop. 4,150), close to the Beaufort...
...plantation tunes of his native New Orleans, mixed them with the sinuous rhythms of Latin America, and produced piano works as fresh and insouciant as their titles were evocative: The Banjo, Bamboula, Souvenir de Porto Rico. On the strength of them, he stands as the precursor to the great line of American nationalists from Charles Ives to Aaron Copland. More's the pity, then, that when last week's program ran long, List modestly cut his sequence of three Gottschalk solo pieces...