Word: lostness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...late. Cohen, who had lost his job as well as a portion of his federal grant, was not about to give up. He filed a lawsuit against the University and two SPH officials, demanding his reinstatement as an assistant professor of Nutrition and pointing the finger at Harvard's unbalanced books. When a Congressional subcommittee heard what Cohen had to say, Harvard was brought face to face with HEW. And HEW launched a massive investigatory audit of some $225 million in federal research grants given to various University faculties from 1974-77. So much for the buddy system...
What does one do, faced with an entire volume of such curiously written items? You might ask what Martin or anyone else finds funny about them. There's a flat-footed doggedness to the way Martin takes tired jokes and tries to recycle them. Unfortunately, he has lost the ability to write a punch-line, and in Cruel Shoes he frequently gets around that simply by reprinting the title of the piece at the end--but this time, in italics. Witness "The Children Called Him Big Nose...
Reading this book can induce paranoia. You'll sit there, turning pages, wondering why you're not laughing, wondering whether it's something wrong with you and not Steve Martin, wondering whether the editors at Putnam have really lost it this time, hoping that the next two-page piece will be a little better...
...Florence during Michelangelo's time, countless victims of stabbings by hit men were seen floating under bridges. In London during the Age of Enlightenment, gangs roamed the streets committing rape. Says Critic George Steiner: "Our sense of a lost civility and order comes from a very short period of exceptional calm-from the 1860s to 1914, or the interlude between the Civil War and World...
...enlisted in pornographic films. The nation subdivides into a dozen drug cultures - the alcohol culture, the cocaine culture, the heroin culture, the Valium culture, the amphetamine culture, and combinations thereof. Legal abortions and the pervasive custom of contraception suggest a society so chary of its future that it has lost its will to perpetuate itself. Says British Author Malcolm Muggeridge: "What will make historians laugh at us is how we express our decadence in terms of freedom and humanism. Western society suffers from a largely unconscious collective death wish." Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who shares with Muggeridge an austere Christian mysticism...