Word: levi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...German contradiction is also embodied by Wagner, who wrote the noxious anti-Semitic essay Jewry in Music, yet who also allowed Hermann Levi to conduct the premiere of the Christian epic Parsifal at Bayreuth. Faust, the national symbol, might be speaking for both Luther and Wagner when he says at the beginning of Goethe's play, "With keen endeavor I have studied philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine, and even, alas, theology. And yet here I stand, a poor fool no wiser than I was before...
NONFICTION: The Chief, Lance Morrow -- Citizen Hughes, Michael Drosnin -- Fathers Playing Catch with Sons, Donald Hall -- Henry James: Literary Criticism, edited by Leon Edel and Mark Wilson -- The Periodic Table, Primo Levi -- Up for Grabs, John Rothchild...
...shattered gunship: broken wheel struts, a bent propeller blade, rusted armor plating, scraps of the fuselage. Resembling patches of smudged snow, remnants of the plane's once white fiber-glass insulating material are scattered everywhere. Earlier, crews of olive-clad Laotian soldiers and Americans in T shirts and grimy Levi's had cut a working area roughly the size of a baseball diamond, first by clearing the dense undergrowth and then by dropping to their hands and knees in shoulder-to-shoulder skirmish lines for a preliminary search of the area. Among the items unearthed were bits of human bones...
...never combining with other elements. They spoke the rough Piedmontese dialect inlaid with Hebrew --"sacred and solemn, geologic, polished smooth by the millennia like the bed of a glacier." As deftly translated by Raymond Rosenthal, the oddities of speech are a delight. So is the "inexplicable imprecation" for which Levi's great-grandfather was famous: "May he have an accident shaped like an umbrella...
...Levi's initiation into chemistry's ordered universe came in the late 1930s as chaos threatened the world. While Mussolini mimicked Hitler's menacing rhetoric, the Jewish student sought relief in science from "all the dogmas, all the unproved affirmations, and all the imperatives" of Fascism. His comrade in this search for verifiable values was Sandro, a peasant youth who later became a celebrated resistance fighter. Sandro dragged Levi on exhausting treks through mountain passes, up rock cliffs and over slopes of ice. "He felt the need," Levi says, "to prepare himself (and to prepare me) for an iron future...