Word: lao
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...deeply involved in the war in Southeast Asia. Starting in 1962, it organized and equipped an army in Laos to fight the Communist Pathet Lao. The army, which grew to 30,000 men, costs the U.S. at least $300 million a year, but Colby credits it with having prevented a Communist takeover...
...surprised that you overlooked these words of Lao...
...blurb on the garishly illustrated cover. "See the werewolf turn into a real flesh-and-blood woman-right before your very eyes." This pitchman's approach, aimed at newsstand buyers of books on the occult, is misleading, for the product, a slim volume entitled The Circus of Dr. Lao, is no tawdry sci-fi thriller. It is instead a blending of the sardonic style of Ambrose Bierce and the homespun hyperbole of Mark Twain...
Circus tells a tale that could happen only in America. A circus, under the direction of an apparently ageless Chinese named Dr. Lao, arrives one day in the town of Abalone, Ariz., and delivers delights that even Barnum would have hedged at promising. "The world is my idea," says Dr. Lao. "As such I present it to you." The circus, a metaphor for his world, is half dream, half nightmare. In its sideshow tents a puritanical schoolteacher is seduced by a syrinx-playing satyr, a gorgon turns an unbelieving harridan into "carnelian chalcedony," one of the harder varieties of building...
...these offerings impress the Abaloneans? Not on your tintype. Their expectations run more to trained-seal acts and Bobo the Dog-faced Boy, and their minds are thus unconditioned to accept such wonders. True members of the American booboisie, they heckle Dr. Lao and his magician during the performance and walk silently out into the hard Arizona sunlight when it is over. One suspects that Sinclair Lewis' Main Streeters might have done much the same thing...