Word: pasts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Fathers and I, by Eric Linklater. A comic gallery of historical portraits intended to show that the past is laughable, the present beneath contempt...
Reward for Struggles. The modern American, says Dr. Dubos, is kidding himself about how healthy he is: a man past 45 has little greater life expectancy than had his grandfathers; he has the world's highest living standard, but 10% of his income* goes for medical care. "One out of every four citizens will have to spend at least some months or years in a mental asylum. One may wonder indeed whether the pretense of superior health is not itself rapidly becoming a mental aberration...
...pastor believes that the ancient times may not be gone irrevocably. "At any rate," he says, "crucifixions have come into fashion again, and they were always a sign of the ancient days." This suggests that "primitive Christianity may also return," not so much reuniting man with his immediate past as carrying him far back through the centuries, to begin again at Christendom's own beginning. And it is to this point of origin that Amadeus struggles to find his way-to be reborn in the idea of the Nativity itself and to stand, with his two brothers...
Wiechert uses modern characters to illustrate his old allegory and presses home his message with intense sincerity. His weakness is a mystified view of history that exaggerates both the stability of the past and the uniqueness of the present. His prose is filled with sentimental, turgid solemnity. But the book will please those who like their religious literature to be a little lower than the angels and a little higher than Lloyd Douglas...
This book is a reverent and amusing hymn to a handful of adventurers who penetrated the bone-littered wastes of Central Asia during the past 125 years. Many of them stayed there, with their heads cleaved from their bodies by the bloodthirsty rulers of Bokhara, Merv, Kokand and Khiva. The most fascinating of these adventurers was one Joseph Wolff, a disputatious Jew turned Anglican missionary, who set out in 1843 to rescue two British officers held captive in Bokhara...