Word: penchants
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When the Swedish Academy last week announced its choice for the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, the reaction across the globe might be summarized as Que Cela, Cela? Was the award to Spanish author Camilo Jose Cela, 73, another example of the Academy's penchant for giving unheard-of writers undreamt-of recognition? Yes, in the sense that Cela has not had much impact outside his native land for a quarter-century. But on reflection, the better answer is no, for Cela, though now little read, has amassed a body of powerful, disturbing work -- and lived a risky, iconoclastic life...
...19th century mind, with its penchant for the scientific and the mechanical, the camera was the supreme mechanism, a trap for facts. Capable of capturing high detail, operated with a minimum of human intervention, it seemed from the first to have a special purchase on the truth. William Henry Fox Talbot, the Englishman who was one of photography's inventors, was merely summing up what would become the judgment of the day when he called his new process the "pencil of nature...
...could speculate endlessly about the source of our fascination with catastrophe: it could stem from an intrinsic human penchant for the morbid, from a profound national boredom rooted in suburbanization, from an intense nervousness about what the future holds for those who lived through the profligate America of the 1980s, or from any other number of conditions or some combination thereof...
Even then, Braden had the temerity to question his coaches' instructions. As a local newspaper columnist wrote, "Vic Braden is the best tennis player ever to come out of Monroe, but he was pretty hard to handle." His penchant for analysis surfaced early. He made pinholes in 3-by-5 cards, then peered through them at athletes in action. "I was isolating segments of their bodies," he explains, "the hips, the thighs, to see how they moved during play...
Some of the harshest criticism is aimed at Brazil. The largest South American country embraces about half the Amazon basin and, in the eyes of critics, has shown a reckless penchant for squandering resources that matter to all mankind. Government leaders around the world are calling on Brazil to stop the burning. Two delegations from the U.S. Congress, which included Senators Al Gore of Tennessee and John Chafee of Rhode Island, traveled to the Amazon earlier this year to see the plight of the rain forest firsthand. Says Gore: "The devastation is just unbelievable. It's one of the great...