Word: lesses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...respectable scientific underpinnings, and earned respect as useful contributions to the solution of current problems." Some people found them useful, anyway--state legislators held up these books as supporting "evidence" for Jim Crow laws. But Handlin excuses "the occasional racist slurs" of the 1940s and '50s, calling them "less troubling than the injustice" a few historians served earlier ethnic peoples by falsifying their history "to gratify the passions of their descendants...
...term "genocide" he trivialized, for the sake of immediate political gain, the past suffering of the Jews. But far more dangerously, this reckless misuse of the term bodes ill for oppressed all over the world. For as he toyed with the language of mass murder, Castro made the crime less horrible, more familiar; if he eventually succeeds in bringing the word into common political discourse, he will bring the crime into realm of the possible...
...possibility of extraterrestrial life, on the possibility of intergalactic communication. For example, he draws a hyperbolic and fatuous parallel between the Big Bang theory of the birth of the universe, and the human birth experience. He proposes a seemingly infinite number of theories in these chapters and substantiates each less well than its predecessor, abandoning totally the close scrutiny he has just advocated so strongly...
...surprisingly, he sympathizes less when his mother errs. Though her offenses were less reprehensible, Wolff bears down on them harshly. When ten-year-old Geoffrey discovers his mother in bed with a grimy ex-Sarasota policeman, he reaches a verdict instantly--"it was all over"--and he catches the next bus to California to set up house for the next 20-odd years with father...
...does someone forgive such a man, much less such a father? Wolff recounts the feelings of betrayal, of abandonment, of sheer abhorrence he felt after his father's death. But eventually--or so he claims--he realizes, "I had forgotten I loved him, mostly, and mostly now I missed him." Though it seems more likely that he did not forget his love, that this love never existed, Geoffrey's claim must be respected. Wolff writes to a Mr. Joseph, his Choate headmaster, that his father was "a bad man and a good father," and Joseph corrects him, "Don't ever...