Word: microcosms
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Political analysts just love Connecticut. They think of it as a sort of microcosm, if only because it has a little bit of everything: dreary industrial cities, picturesque towns and superb suburbia. It has a certain amount of agriculture-if tough turkeys, and apples used mostly for bland cider, can be counted. It has roughly 360,000 registered Democrats, 360,000 registered Republicans and 600,000 independents-and the analysts adore independents. Connecticut is small but heavily populated: at its widest stretch, it is less than 100 miles across; within its modest boundaries live some 2,500,000 people...
Your story on the Monroe Doctrine detailed these anomalies nicely, and showed the Cuban situation to be what it really is: a microcosm of all our cold war frustrations...
...marina for 700 private boats. The first 20 floors of each tower will be given over to spirals of garage space; rising above will be apartments and penthouses to house 896 families. With all its recreational and shopping features nestled conveniently at its base, it is a microcosm of a city and tenants can work, relax and shop without going off the reservation...
...satire is blithely disguised. Contemporary civilization is reduced to a microcosm: a small Japanese town of the last century. And the story is presented as a phlebotomously funny parody of a Hollywood western. When the film begins, the town is divided, just as the modern world is divided, into two armed camps. In each of them, like a land-grabbing cattleman surrounded by gunmen, sits a vicious little warlord surrounded by swordsmen. Enter the hero (Toshiro Mifune), a strong, silent, shabby samurai whose sword is for hire and no questions asked. He looks the situation over: sheriff bullied, citizens cowed...
Good female prose, if properly clipped of gush, has the kind of alert precision that makes most masculine sentences seem like so much unfinished business. As writers, women are usually mistresses of microcosm: their themes may not be large, but their literary housekeeping is unassailable-the commas properly placed, the exact word found to match an idea or thing. One of the better U.S. dispensers of this feminine mot justice is Elizabeth Hardwick, the wife of Poet Robert Lowell. Judging by this first collection of her essays and book reviews-most of them fugitives from oblivion in Partisan Review...