Word: order
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SENSE OF ORDER by E.H. Gombrich Cornell University; 411 pages...
Ordinarily, art histories are not the stuff of summer reading. But E.H. Gombrich is not the usual historian, and The Sense of Order is not a standard history. Subtitled "A study in the psychology of decorative art," this wittily illustrated volume ranges from a New Yorker cover of Saul Steinberg's to a wall inscription of Pompeii. Gombrich's central thesis concerns the need for order that resides in every human brain. Sometimes nature is accommodating: in hexagonal snowflakes, in the rhythmic chirping of crickets, in the natural laws of gravity and motion. Far more often...
...Communist betrayals and fascist atrocities, executioners and victims. Many of the recollections are as sanguinary as the war: bombs strike a hospital, airplanes strafe civilians, firing squads are everywhere. Hitler and Stalin control the moves offstage, ever willing to sacrifice Spaniards to German and Soviet causes. Contradiction is the order of the day: "How do you explain that?" inquires a woman. "?Dios mio! The people who destroy holy images kiss them." On the left, a father and son have their own civil war and lead separate socialist organizations. Yet throughout, the reader is struck by the dignity and character...
...Civil Tongue), retails a joke about an Oriental fighter named Kid Pro Kuo, "who gave as good as he got." And that one of the characters, a fight manager named Fogbound Franklin, speaks of an important victory as a "mild-stone" and ponders asking for a "decease and desist order" when a gangster tries to move...
...declared that a literal account of anything is neither true nor false," wrote his biographer, Hesketh Pearson. "And so, in order to achieve essential truth, he would embroider an episode and sometimes even invent one, as in his account of dancing around [Dublin's] Fitzroy Square with a policeman in the early hours of the morning...