Word: presentational
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rising about 1 ft. a day, will spill out of its southern end into the Situk River (see chart), a salmon-spawning stream that is the economic lifeblood of Yakutat. If the lake overflows, the clear Situk could become a destructive torrent of silty water about 20 times its present volume, unfit for salmon and fishermen. "In another 500 to 1,000 years," says Mayo, "Hubbard Glacier could fill Yakutat Bay, as it did in about 1130." Susie Abraham, 85, a silver-haired elder of Yakutat's native Tlingit Indian tribe, is fatalistic. "This place where we sit," she says...
Lauren is a master of minutiae. In advertisements and store displays, he surrounds his understated wares with loads of charming and inventive doodads, many of them for sale. Rather than merely display a blazer or a skirt, he likes to present a whole pile of goodies. The side tables in Lauren displays are nearly always covered with rows of framed pictures that suggest comfortable surroundings of family and tradition. Lauren's home-furnishing arrangements fairly gush with conspicuous consumption: eight pillows on a bed, all with ruffles and contrasting fabrics. Lauren hopes that customers will buy the whole package...
...most other societies, an admission of human error might seem commonplace. But not in the Soviet Union, where for decades official failures have seldom been acknowledged, official sins seldom recognized. Disasters such as plane crashes and earthquakes are like trees falling in the forest when no one is present. No one ever hears the crash...
Theroux, always adept at following literary form, sticks to the basic rules of science fiction. The first is never invent the future, just extrapolate the present. The second: the hardware and social order should always be more impressive than the quality of life. O-Zone's projection of industrial society as a spreading toxic stain is not farfetched. Neither is its assumption of a self-sealed managerial elite, the establishment of airport- like security in the streets or even the possibility of renewal...
...explicitly framed around contradictory notions of the nature of God. The author's reputation and fame grew with his extraordinarily graceful and graphic renderings of contemporary manners and mores. Couples (1968), the three Rabbit novels, the two collections of stories about the Jewish writer and malingerer Henry Bech, all present surfaces so intriguing that it is possible to ignore their depths. But a Protestant sense of sin peeks through most of Updike's fiction -- sometimes, as in A Month of Sundays (1975), expressed directly by an agonized clerical narrator. Roger Lambert, another lapsed preacher, comes from this austere region...