Word: past
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Short-Lived Title. Lately, the ailing nucleus of the city has been making a remarkable recovery. A burst of new construction-gleaming office towers, bank headquarters and a handsome civic center for the arts-has rejuvenated much of the area. Over the past eight years, the city's businessmen have committed $800 million for downtown building and remodeling. By 1970, that investment will yield 9,000,000 sq. ft. of new office space, almost twice as much as was built downtown in the first 60 years of the century. In the process of rejuvenation, the old heart...
Woozy Notion. To this the author adds three central characters-a German, an Englishman, a German-born Israeli-all lawyers assigned to the case. At first, they seem to invite a formal, wooden trialogue that might be entitled "stances to be taken when confronted by the enormities of the past." The German protects himself from guilt by evolving a woozy, romantic notion of national change and renewal. Today's "good, decent people," he reflects hazily, could no longer be "the same people who had performed the actions . . . the horrifying things they had." The Englishman avoids large moral judgments, clinging...
Which one is right? Is there, in fact, any polemical stake that society can drive once and for all into the heart of this monster from the past, and so dispose of the problem? Clearly not. Cleverly, wisely, Davidson offers no final solution. Instead he slowly turns the book into a rueful seminar on the possibilities that men have of ever "making good again" after various sorts of failure. In the process, the word Wiedergutmachung becomes a kind of pun that can be read on a number of levels, some hopeful, some somber: restoring to virtue a society that...
...those familiar with the Councillor's rhetoric and style this new proposal will come as no surprise. In the past he has suggested turning the Lampoon building into a public urinal ("Well, that's what it looks like isn't it"), the Yard into a dog pound ("We'll put ropes around all of those trees, see, and let 'em sit"), and the area under the Yard into a public parking lot. ("Only thing the land is good for, see. Personally I hope that when they build it the whole place sinks.") In the future he promises more of what...
...family solidarity so that on every block, as on Eighth Street, there are two sisters, a mother, dozens of children, and countless inlaws within three doors of each other, and where there is no such thing as a current issue, so strong is the feeling of a neighborhood past that impinges on it. Nobody simply exists in East Cambridge; everybody lives next to his neighbors and close to his family history...