Word: legend
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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According to legend, the Mesopotamians blamed their woes on Sargon's grandson, whose hubris had supposedly angered the gods. But the American and French researchers, led by Yale archaeologist Harvey Weiss, offer a more scientific, if no less surprising, explanation. They believe the drought was part of a major shift in weather patterns that affected the climate in many different areas of the globe 4,000 years ago. From Egypt to the Aegean to India, rainfall diminished and temperatures dropped. "This is opposite to what you might expect from global warming," explains George Kukla, senior research scientist at the Lamont...
...Broadway baby and quintessential New Yorker died in 1990, leaving a hole in the fabric of American musical life that many have found irreparable. In the three years since Bernstein's death, sales of his records have doubled, his compositions have started to win greater respect, and his legend has waxed. It's almost as if the great man had never left. It's almost as if he were . . . Elvis...
...says. "He just seems to generate a celebratory impulse from everybody." But some people find the spectacle suspiciously premature. "Unfortunately, he is being commercially exploited right now," notes another Lenny, conductor Leonard Slatkin. "There is a lot of effort and time and money being put into keeping the legend alive. I find it all a little bit sad." Says Ernest Fleischmann, executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic: "Bernstein's memory is best served by his music and his recordings and by the people he influenced...
...kids and a wife. He can't say no to the Captain, but love and good sense tie him to his family. In a jumbled kind of way, he manages to honor both obligations, and everyone heads toward the Mexican border and the winding down of McMurtry's beguiling legend. The author's minor characters are sketched with a fine, loose skill; there's an old Indian tracker named Famous Shoes, and a white man who has spent his life roaming the Southwest with a pack of dogs, killing off the region's bears...
McMurtry, a valuable, observant writer in his other fiction, is a couple of sizes better than that here. A muzzy golden haze -- perhaps just sunset through the dust thrown up by the hooves of horses and cattle -- surrounds the two books. This is not just legend mongering, although the author mongers better than most. The second novel is the lesser; no more, really, than a respectful conclusion. But in Streets of Laredo, as in Lonesome Dove, McMurtry plays fair. Evil is evil, death is death. Gone is gone. And though it is far more frightening, he manages to look...