Word: humanize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most discriminating. His books Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening and Moments of Reprieve read as if revenge (a dish best eaten cold, advises the proverb) were a matter of patient qualitative analysis. In The Periodic Table (1984), Levi even used the known basic elements as metaphors for human characteristics. His Jewish ancestors from the Piedmont, for example, resembled argon: "Inert in their inner spirits, inclined to disinterested speculation, witty discourses, elegant, sophisticated, and gratuitous discussion...
Levi is obsessed with the structure of complicity that made the Lagers run. The camps were literally concentrated worlds where pain, humiliation, fear and base human nature were intensified. To the familiar images of families tumbling out of boxcars to be greeted officially by insults and clubbings, Levi adds the reception that older prisoners gave to new arrivals. "Rarely was a newcomer received, I won't say as a friend but at least as a companion- in-misfortune; in the majority of cases, those with seniority . . . showed irritation or even hostility...
...Nazis aimed at the complete moral collapse of their victims, because a degraded people would do the dirty work of their tormentors, and because those deprived of their humanity could be tortured and killed without unduly disturbing the sensibilities of their murderers. Levi's logic leads him to burdensome conclusions, not the least of which is that the saved were not the best but the worst, "the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray zone.' " Levi's troubled honesty is not what usually gets hailed as a triumph of the human spirit. His work dispels such cliches...
Some of the year' s most unforgettable photographs focus on a superpower summit, a stock- market panic and a congressional probe into a scandal that shook a government. Others are on a more human scale: a Pontiff embracing a young AIDS victim, a preacher fallen from grace, a wide- eyed little girl rescued from a well in Texas. All are presented in a 24- page portfolio...
Desmond Tutu, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, has traveled the world denouncing apartheid, South Africa's system of official discrimination against blacks. But last week the black clergyman took aim at a different target: human rights abuses in black-ruled African countries. "It is sad that South Africa is noted for its vicious violations of human rights," Tutu told a Nairobi press conference at a meeting of the All Africa Conference of Churches. "But it is also very sad to note that there is less freedom in some independent African countries than there was in the much maligned colonial...