Word: polarizing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Allsburg's vision may be bizarre, but it strikes a broadly responsive chord. Jumanji (1981), his board-game fantasy, won the Caldecott Medal, the industry's most prestigious award for illustrated children's books. The Polar Express, also a Caldecott winner, has appeared on best-seller lists in three Christmas seasons since its release in 1985. In this lovely tale, a boy wakes on Christmas Eve to find a train wreathed in steam below his bedroom window, waiting to take him to the North Pole and a meeting with Santa Claus. In all, the nine books Van Allsburg has published...
Though many of these outlying efforts have been wildly successful, the zoos themselves are still the front line. A child who rubs noses, even through the plate glass, with a polar bear or a penguin may be far more likely to mature into an eager conservationist than into one who sees animals as toys or accessories. It is hard to walk around a good zoo without caring, deeply, about whether this miraculous wealth of lovely, peculiar, creepy, unfathomable creatures survives or perishes. And it will be a great sorrow if zoos are ever the last place on earth where...
...POLAR STAR by Martin Cruz Smith (Random House; $19.95). Smith sets Moscow investigator Arkady Renko (Gorky Park) off on another bizarre case, this one on a fishing boat on the Bering Sea; one dead body leads to others along an arc of increasing menace and violence...
...POLAR STAR by Martin Cruz Smith (Random House; $19.95). In a sequel to his best-selling detective novel Gorky Park, Smith sets Moscow investigator Arkady Renko off on another bizarre case. The setting this time is a fishing boat on the Bering Sea; one dead body leads to others along an arc of increasing menace and violence...
Probably it is necessary for us to have heroes so that, by inoculation, we will learn to distrust heroes. Baseball idols peddling autographs at $15 a scribble provide this useful disillusion today. A few decades ago, the clay feet -- frostbitten, of course -- were those of polar explorers. Wally Herbert, who reached the North Pole by dogsled in 1969, writes knowledgeably about two of the most fascinating of the fakers: Robert E. Peary and Dr. Frederick Cook, archrivals in heroics and fraud...