Word: humankind
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WARTIME by Paul Fussell (Oxford University; $19.95). Humankind, wrote T.S. Eliot, cannot bear very much reality. In this richly detailed historical study of American and British behavior during World War II, Fussell argues that the horror was of such magnitude that participants -- civilians as much as soldiers -- survived it only by reliance on euphemism and illusions: our lads were all brave heroes, for example, while theirs were sadistic thugs. Fussell has a sharp eye for the bawdry and the Catch-22 absurdities of combat. But hard to find in his barrages of withering contempt is much sense that this...
...Temple, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Walker's characters recount history using Latin and Native American folk models. The central figure, Lissie, describes turning points in humankind's history as observed through one half-million years of reincarnation...
Congdon's Tales of the Lost Formicans takes a weepy topic that might easily have been a TV movie of the week and inverts it into a witty, goofy, almost anthropological look at humankind as viewed by aliens from outer space. The patriarch of a suburban blue-collar family is dying of Alzheimer's disease, while his daughter acts out anger over her divorce through petty crimes of feminist rage and his grandson runs away and ends up sleeping in shopping malls. The extraterrestrials are staging a sort of slide show to explain how human art, society and psychology work...
...Those who subscribe to this theory reject the idea that Jesus was oriented toward end-of-the-world questions and apocalyptic warnings. Instead he focused on the poor, the sick, the handicapped, the injustices of the world he saw around him. "He was painfully aware of the misery of humankind," asserts James M. Robinson, noted director of Claremont's Institute for Antiquity and Christianity. "He felt he should do nothing to aggravate human misery. As long as there was a beggar without food tonight, how could he store up food in his rucksack...
More than 150 students who wanted to find out if Keats was right that literature would "lift the thoughts and sooth the cares of humankind" learned yesterday that they will have to wait at least until next year for the answer...