Word: homo
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Each of the book's 16 stories (most of which originally appeared in the New Yorker) can fly on its own. Taken together, they form both a whimsical saga of invisible dynasties and an extended commentary on Homo sapiens. Warner's elves are in many ways mirror images of men. They cannot weep and do not hate. They reproduce with difficulty but live for centuries: "Fairies are constructed for longevity, not fertility." They are governed exclusively by women-the more capricious the better...
Selzer, a faculty member at the Yale University Medical School, can be entertaining, even whimsical, when he discusses baldness or Homo sapiens' his toric love affair with alcohol. But there is no drollery in his discussions of life's end. Like a man describing an old colleague, Selzer watches death at work. "You do not die all at once," observes the surgeon. "Some tissues live on for minutes, even hours, giving still their little cellular shrieks, molecular echoes of the agony of the whole corpus . . . There are outposts where clusters of cells yet shine, besieged, little lights blinking...
...best-read fiction science (more than 30 million paperback copies sold) is Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods? and its sequels. Von Däniken, a former Swiss hotelman and convicted embezzler with no formal scientific training, professes the notion that the species Homo sapiens was created when astronauts from outer space descended to earth about 10,000 years ago and copulated with apes. It was a kind of one-night stand. According to the author, the satiated aliens soon left for new worlds, leaving the seeds of civilization-and the banana...
...however, all over the U.S. and in many areas around the globe, bugs are on the march, relentlessly not only retaking the ground so recently won by Homo sapiens but also making new advances. Aided by Government restrictions on pesticides as well as their own growing immunity to the chemicals, and benefiting further from the miscalculations and complacency of their human enemies, insects seem well on their way to fulfilling the chilling prophecy of The Hellstrom Chronicle: "If any living species is to inherit the earth, it will...
...classic study of man at play, Homo Ludens, Historian Johan Huizinga described it as "a free activity standing quite consciously outside 'ordinary life,' " animated by "the impulse to create orderly form." Once the idea of order goes, so goes the game itself- and its fans. A report commissioned by the Ontario provincial government on hockey violence in Canada concluded: "When the evidence strongly indicates that there is a conscious effort to sell the violence in hockey to enrich a small group of show business entrepreneurs at the expense of a great sport (not to mention the corruption...