Word: hards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fame has a way of ruining a writer's reputation. Take the case of Kurt Vonnegut, who became a cult figure in the late '60s after enduring years of hard-earned obscurity. A growing army of high school and college readers began proclaiming him a deep thinker, at about the same time that critics started cuffing him for being a shallow artist. Both judgments were wrong. Vonnegut has never written a thought that could not occur to a sporadically meditative teenager, nor has he pretended to; those who are impressed by the profundity of a shrug...
Hoagland does not burden the reader with a false sense of wonder or an exaggerated sense of adventure. He conveys what he learns as something that a middle-aged man should already know: months of wandering in a hard place make one sick, lonely, itchy and tired. "I was weary," he writes, "of the whole African calliope - that nagging, pulsing musical din that has been reverberating strongly without letup for thousands of years before you arrive and will be continuing without any respite for sickness or fatigue long after you have left the earth...
...hears the din in Khartoum where the Blue and the White Niles meet and in a southern Sudan sapped to a "hopeless torpor" by epidemic. The specific character and hardship of a place are conveyed with arresting brevity. On the hard desert of the Muslim north: "It depressed me to see the starved, tethered donkeys outside suffering while the fat ones ate, and the thirsty chickens dashing for a chance to peck at our spit." In the river town of Gelhak he records the visual cacophony in Polaroid prose: "We saw a man with a monkey's nose...
...cocaine. And yet Americans mean something by it. The notion of decadence is a vehicle that carries all kinds of strange and overripe cargo-but a confusing variety of meanings does not add up to meaninglessness. Decadence, like pornography (both have something of the same fragrance), may be hard to define, but most people think they know it when they...
...hard-working fact merchant," he said. "The days of wining and dining and getting things done by favoritism are gone...