Word: pasts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...wrenching break from the past has its disasters. The longest and best story, Goodbye, Columbus, is about Jews who have made the ascent from grubby Newark to the green pastures of suburban Short Hills, NJ. Mr. Patimkin is a rich manufacturer of kitchen sinks, "tall, strong, ungrammatical, and a ferocious eater." Son Ronald was an all-state basketball player in high school and a Big Ten star at Ohio State. Daughter Brenda is beautiful, plays crack tennis and goes to Radcliffe. Her suitor, Neil Klugman, tells of his summer affair with Brenda-a daytime round of basketball, pingpong, mile runs...
This book implies a moral stated by Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat...
...Toynbee, an astronomer of the past who views history as a multitude of ever-turning cultural constellations, the rise and fall of Greco-Roman civilization is merely an episode lasting roughly from 1000 B.C. to 600 A.D. Toynbee traces the course of Hellenism's bright star lucidly, a little offhandedly, treating it largely as an object lesson for the present. Hellenism's central characteristic was the worship of man-exemplified by the ludicrously human crew of Olympian divinities and, later, by a more sophisticated secular humanism. This man worship, which has thrilled so many historians of Greece, chills...
This patched up Hellenism, but it could not revitalize it spiritually. Into the deserted streets of the spirit crept Stoicism and Epicureanism, cool in faith, cooler in comfort. Astrology was in vogue together with "archaism," an aping of the past for the sake of novelty. The death of Hellenism in the fall of the Roman Empire was not caused by a "triumph of religion and barbarism," says Toynbee, taking issue with Gibbon. As Toynbee sees it, Christianity did not put the torch to the classic world; it lit one for it in the sightless dark...
...Stark, Dean is superb in his portrayal of a teenager with more energy than direction, forced by his family to move from town to town to escape his past. He makes every attempt to adjust to his new environment, but there is an insurmountable obstacle in the form of the local ruling class, a group of unsavory types who just can't wait to become mature, full-grown gangsters and begin practicing the arts early...