Word: lifes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...opening pages of Disgrace, which has just won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, David Lurie, a white professor of communications, assesses his life: "He is in good health, his mind is clear... He lives within his income, within his temperament, within his emotional means. Is he happy? By most measurements, yes, he believes he is." And then comes the first crack in the wall of his self-satisfaction: "However, he has not forgotten the last chorus of Oedipus: Call no man happy until he is dead...
...ransacking her home, shooting her dogs and taking turns with her. "Too many people, too few things," Lurie thinks afterward. "What there is must go into circulation ... Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could...
This may help him preserve his sanity, but Lurie--resolutely blind, like Oedipus, to the less schematic aspects of life--loses everything else. "One gets used to things getting harder," he realizes. "One ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet." Disgrace is a mini-opera without music by a writer at the top of his form. Its bleak vision lingers, shattering any hope of a redemptive state of grace...
...parade of superlatives. After Vladimir Horowitz, he was the 20th century's most famous classical pianist as well as a world-renowned bon vivant on speaking terms with everyone from Henry James to Golda Meir. In old age he wrote two best-selling memoirs that recounted a Kennedyesque sex life. He played his last concert in 1976 at the age of 89--then left his wife for another woman...
...disaster. Widespread demand for food and manufactured products has contaminated our food chain, arable land and water sources, as well as the air we breathe. We must all begin to cope with the results of urban sprawl and help prevent the destruction of Earth's ecological balance and the life of our planet. FAY SMITH Richardson, Texas...