Word: lumber
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Kidder also provides bonuses: vest-pocket essays on architecture and the lumber business; insights into bidding, building techniques and the pleasures of physical labor. His builders are a proud bunch not given to "cob jobs," carpenters' jargon for sloppy work. Their praise is dispensed with the left hand, as in "perfect enough" or "good enough for Amherst." By this standard, Tracy Kidder's book is not too cobby...
...dollar has made U.S. exports artificially expensive to foreign buyers, and imports artificially cheap to American consumers. Quick example: loggers in the Pacific Northwest figure that the dollar's bloated exchange rate against its Canadian cousin (an American buck was worth $1.36 Canadian last week) gives Canadian lumber exported to the U.S. an automatic 30% price advantage, contributing to a $20 billion deficit in U.S. trade with Canada. With curiously bad timing considering the mood in Washington, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney last week proposed a new trade pact that would open the two countries still wider to each other...
Even developed countries resort to old-fashioned tariff walls. Japan, which generally has some of the lowest import fees in the world, imposes a 15% to 20% tariff on plywood because of the political clout of its lumber industry. In 1983 the U.S. hiked its duty on large motorcycles from 4.4% to 49.4% to protect Harley-Davidson, the last American manufacturer of the big bikes...
...intend to make a social statement beyond the psychological wars going on between the characters. Namely, that the emerging modern city at the beginning of the 20th century brought some bad living conditions and, considering Brecht was a Marxist, an intensified capitalism that had extended not only into the lumber mills but also into people's sex lives. The proletarian hero George Garga's change into an authoritarian lumber owner also points to the submerged importance of the individual and the increased importance of the social role in which the individual acts. Garga and Shlink aren't such bad guys...
...mechanical at the start, Puckette plays in full-form after he's been tranformed into a mean-and-nasty lumber mill owner. Playing up the character's naivete and dislocation from the rest of the cast at the begining of the play would have made the metamorphosis more striking, however, Lawrence primes the hautiness and annoying overconfidence of Shlink well in the beginning and carries some of that luggage over to his new role without showing all of Shlink's new-found sensitivity...