Word: letup
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...conveys what he learns as something that a middle-aged man should already know: months of wandering in a hard place make one sick, lonely, itchy and tired. "I was weary," he writes, "of the whole African calliope - that nagging, pulsing musical din that has been reverberating strongly without letup for thousands of years before you arrive and will be continuing without any respite for sickness or fatigue long after you have left the earth...
...audience is like the helpless group trapped in the diner, and is treated with equal contempt. Messages are pounded into us without letup--the Vietnam generation turning its violence back on America, the helplessness of women (who do nothing but tremble and bawl, and like Cheryl repeat 90 times, "I'm scared"), the arrogance of power, the sadism built into our society. We are supposed to sit there mesmerized and say, "Gee, I never thought of that," as if we haven't been thinking all these things for a long time. It is no longer enough merely to throw such...
...instant before Seltzer's strobe lights flash, she smiles in a way that seems marvelously natural, although the smile's wattage is far greater than anything likely to be encountered in the real world. For perhaps 20 minutes, the pattern of turn, swirl, smile is repeated without letup, but with subtle variations. In these 20 minutes, Seltzer fires off four or five rolls of 36-exposure Kodachrome, perhaps 180 frames of film...
...nation's energy binge has gone on without significant letup. Token fuel-saving gestures have been widespread, and it may be that most Americans have actually turned back the thermostat a notch now and then or switched off a needless light. Still, through last summer America had managed to use and import more fuel by far than ever before...
...maimings-athletic, psychological and sexual-occur without letup. Their culmination is the madness and chaos of the rattlesnake hunt itself, with the implication that the ancient, once powerful symbol of the snake has been so trivialized it no longer has the capacity to heal. As in past novels, Crews gets carried away with his own wildly fertile imagination and verbal gifts. His new book is full of brilliant descriptions and characters attempting to kick and gouge their way through some back door to salvation. The problem is that there is too little distinction between the truly grotesque and the gratuitously...