Word: parkinson
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EAST AND WEST by C. Northcote Parkinson. 330 pages. Houghton M/fflm...
...humorous Law No. 1 ("Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion") that put Cyril Northcote Parkinson's name right up there beside Calvin Coolidge's ("When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results"). This book now puts Historian Parkinson in the position of the comedian who has had his audience in stitches, clears his throat and says, "But, seriously...
Alternating Phases. Parkinson's thesis is that the whole of civilized history can be reduced to the confrontation of the East and West, with "alternating phases of Oriental and Western ascendancy." The West set the pendulum in motion with the capture of Troy in about 1250 B.C., which launched the Greeks' thrust into Asia Minor. Since that time, the East has rebounded with two long periods of ascendancy-one following the Persian conquests under Darius (522 B.C.), the other from roughly A.D. 400 to 1000, when Buddhism was sweeping Asia and Europe was plunged in the Dark Ages...
...Parkinson's argument that the pendulum is now swinging eastward. The first signs of the shift, he feels, appeared in 1850 with the Taiping rebellion in China, followed closely by the Indian Mutiny and eventually by the Boxer rising of 1900. But the crucial date is 1905, and the crucial event the destruction of the Russian fleet by the Japanese. Since then, Parkinson feels, the "established prestige of the West" has been shattered. (The destruction of the Japanese fleet by the U.S. Navy in World War II does not seem to impress him.) Parkinson does not believe that Eastern...
Part of the building will be equipped for treatment of patients with brain tumors, diabetic eye damage, Parkinson's disease, and breast cancer. Beams of atomic particles from the adjacent 160 million volt electron cyclotron will improve upon the traditional X-ray for treatment of localized tumors...