Word: moorehead
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...FATAL IMPACT by Alan Moorehead. 230 pages. Harper...
...history of man's ventures and adventures into the lives of the peoples of the Pacific Ocean, Alan Moorehead (The White Nile, The Blue Nile, Cooper's Creek) has constructed a coherent parable that is an irony in time a version of the fall of man-a chronicle of inevitable disasters. The "impact" of which he writes in this unobtrusively expert narrative is the effect of the European Enlightenment upon the primitive, "the fateful moment when a social capsule is broken open, when primitive creatures, beasts as well as men, are confronted for the first time with civilization...
...Moorehead's hero is Captain James Cook, and his story deals chiefly with Cook's investigation of three very different places: Tahiti (a geographical designation that includes what are now the islands of Hawaii), Australia, about which Moorehead, himself an Australian, writes with wounding perception and Antarctica, which the 19th century almost stripped of life and in which man now lives in catacombs of perpetual ice, sustained by machines. It is with the first two regions that Moorehead deals most expertly...
...thing they lacked was a sense of guilt, which, much to Moorehead's evident regret, was imported by missionaries along with a new taboo-against strong drink. It is nice to know, however, that when a latecomer called Charles Darwin offered a consolatory dram of booze to the muted inhabitants of what he called "the fallen paradise," they rose to the occasion with noble savagery. Gravely they put their fingers before their lips. Solemnly they uttered the word "missionary." But then they drank...
HUSH . . . HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE. Four durable movie queens (Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Agnes Moorehead, Mary Astor) turn a lushly photographed thriller into frightful fun, though the horrors provided by Producer-Director Robert Aldrich (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) are mostly formula...