Word: musts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...there have been grumblings. His colleagues, principally, confront him with their contention that publicizing and practicing science are two irreconcilable aims. So Broca's Brain is an entirely representative work--on the one hand we're treated to Sagan's youthful enthusiasm, imagination, and charm; on the other we must contend with the superficiality and disjointedness which, many claim, have marred his entire career...
...doubt. Sagan shies away from the secular implications of his lofty ideas. In the course of declaring, for example, that we will one day have robots for garbagemen (at current prices, the human version are "expendable"). Sagan mentions hastily that "the effective re-employment of those human beings must, of course be arranged; but...that should not be too difficult." Such is his political sagacity...
...fares little better. Debates on the existence of God, he writes cavalierly, are "good fun." And at the end of the book he discusses the need to apply his rigid scientific criteria to all schools of belief, reviving the Victorian controversy. If inaccuracies are found, he says, the culprit must at once be discarded--thus the Bible must...
Wolff lucidly discerns and expresses his complex, ambivalent emotions--shame mixed with admiration, repulsion juxtaposed with idolatry. His slickly-written prose deceives in its own way, presenting what must have been an exhaustive process of disengagement as a cinch to untangle. His rapid-fire style is possible because Wolff refuses to become mired in the devastations of youth. The straightforward manner could only be assumed by someone who has weeded an overgrown and tangled history and arrived at a resolution with which he can comfortably live...
...abhorrence he felt after his father's death. But eventually--or so he claims--he realizes, "I had forgotten I loved him, mostly, and mostly now I missed him." Though it seems more likely that he did not forget his love, that this love never existed, Geoffrey's claim must be respected. Wolff writes to a Mr. Joseph, his Choate headmaster, that his father was "a bad man and a good father," and Joseph corrects him, "Don't ever again say your father was a bad man. There are no bad men." Certainly Wolff's description of his father...