Word: idealizations
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...significant that the first sentence of the first book is "The year began with lunch." This flat-bellied author ("only one real meal a day") loves food with discriminating passion and in Provence has found his ideal turf. "You pay attention," he observes, "to when the melons are good, when asparagus arrives, to the fact that wild mushrooms are due in three weeks. It's about as far away from pretentious cuisine as you can get. Everyone's got an opinion or a secret. With a couple of questions, they'll talk about...
...they occur in a cooperative international environment where economies are capitalist, trade is free, political life is democratic, security is collective, and some degree of sovereignty is pooled. Europe -- thanks to the Common Market, the Helsinki process and the march toward integration in 1993 -- is closer to that ideal than anywhere else. Hence Slovenia, Lithuania and the Ukraine have somewhere to go. And, crucially, their masters in Belgrade and Moscow have less to fear in letting them...
...most influential play in English, Hamlet, is generally taken to show the failure of the Man of Thought. It ends with the arrival of the alternative ideal: Fortinbras, conquering prince of Norway, a decisive Man of Action. Lee Blessing's fascinating new play begins literally where Hamlet ends and asks whether Fortinbras proves any better a leader...
...bone good ole boy, reloading one of the movie's zillion firearms with a fancy twirl of the wrist -- proving he has become, in Schwarzenegger's words, "a kinder, gentler terminator" by forswearing murder: he merely shoots off a record number of kneecaps. And T-1000 seems an ideal villain. It can replicate any person it touches and annihilate its victim with a slash of its rapier limbs: Cyborg Scissorarms. We eagerly await the moment when the T-1000 touches Arnold and puts into play two of the movies' oldest, most effective tricks. Mistaken identity! Evil twins...
...America was not to preserve old cultures but to forge a new, American culture. "By an intermixture with our people," President George Washington told Vice President John Adams, immigrants will "get assimilated to our customs, measures and laws: in a word, soon become one people." This was the ideal that a century later Israel Zangwill crystallized in the title of his popular 1908 play The Melting Pot. And no institution was more potent in molding / Crevecoeur's "promiscuous breed" into Washington's "one people" than the American public school...