Word: levying
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Twenty-six years ago, I was arrested for selling a pair of jeans to a plainclothes Soviet policeman. They weren't even Levi's 501s, they were the kind with the zipper, but that's not why I was arrested. It was a setup, designed to scare a 16-year-old and his 20 teenage fellow travelers into behaving for the remainder of their summer behind the Iron Curtain. And scare me it did, though the authorities allowed me to rejoin my group after a few hours of interrogation...
...Made in the USA Foundation plans to compile a list of popular products and their place of manufacture for a forthcoming book titled Made in the USA: A Catalog of the Best American Products. Joel Joseph, the group's founder, plans to contrast such U.S.-made goods as Levi's and Macintosh computers with ringers that include Perry Ellis "America Series" shirts (made in Mauritius) and Rockport shoes (Portugal and Taiwan). Joseph is lobbying for legislation that would require advertisers to disclose where their products are manufactured...
...Levi was a professional chemist, manager of a paint factory in Turin until he retired at 58 to write, and so he writes from a scientific perspective and with a scientist's precision. But he was also a humanist, a lover of poetry, and these brief essays demonstrate the remarkable range of his interests, from children's games to the genius of Rabelais to the dissatisfactions of playing chess against a computer to the question of why butterflies are considered beautiful. And his mind is agile. When he discovers that the framework of a crinoline gown in the Kremlin museum...
Some people mistrust collections of essays on the ground that they are often fragmentary and monotonous, but it is precisely the diversity of Levi's pensees (artfully translated by Raymond Rosenthal) that makes them so entertaining. That and the basic quality of Levi's mind, skeptical but sympathetic, a bit melancholy but witty; one feels that he is a friend. About all those beetles, Levi speculates that they may be the creatures destined to take over the postnuclear world. "Many millions of years will have to pass," he writes, "before a beetle particularly loved by God . . . will find written...
...Russia House mixes spying and glasnost, commanding suspense and a treatise on our times. -- Primo Levi's essays distill a mind of rare quality...