Word: manness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Born François-Marie Arouet on Nov. 22, 1694-his father quite possibly not his mother's husband-Voltaire soon decided* that a man's main choice in life was to play the hammer or the anvil. Zozo, as he was nicknamed, had no doubts about which role he intended to take. Blessed with a middle-class background, a sound Jesuit education, a phenomenal memory and a wit to match his impudence, Voltaire hammered on every anvil in sight with an exuberance no enlightened common sense could quite explain...
Once he had money and independence, Voltaire settled down to a cautious but often brilliantly effective guerrilla war against France's ancien régime. He was, Besterman suggests, the first man to recognize and mobilize that new creature, public opinion...
...equally desiccated lot of Nazis whose aims seem less clear, but whose posturings and preoccupations are more exotic. There is, of course, a doomed agent who is the pawn of both groups. The days of John le Carré's simple, cigarette-smoking depressive are over, however. Our man is just down from the Alps, where he lived and worked with a knot of flagellant priests. He makes it to the end, snatching prisoners from concentration camps, but he has bad pains on the 8th, 17th and 26th of each month, the very days when his ecclesiastical friends used...
...generations, most Americans have regarded tradition as something to be abandoned without much regret-like a too heavy saddlebag on the Donner Pass or a jammed rifle at Shiloh. That a man should live and die in the house where he was born, that he should take up his father's trade as a matter of course-these things have signified stagnation. Change has been our commonplace, our comfort and our proof of progress...
...getting somewhere"). An orchard foreman navigates his way through the niceties of pruning apple trees. A wheelwright remembers how he used to build wagons ("For making the hubs we always chose wych-elm") and paint them ("The blue rode well in the corn"). The village veterinarian, a sensitive man, contemplates the tortuous ethics of "factory farms," where pigs and chickens are raised assembly style. Wrinkling his brow over incipient inbred cannibalism, he observes darkly: "Tail biting among pigs is becoming a quite incredibly large problem...