Word: presentational
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This issue is our contribution to the very special Fourth of July the nation will celebrate next month, a birthday present to the Statue of Liberty as she turns 100. Like most stimulating journalism, it will, the editors expect and indeed hope, spark some spirited disagreements about our choices and our omissions. For example, in Books we talk about that distinctive American contribution to detective fiction, the hard-boiled hero. Some will rightly miss a piece about the remarkable and varied voices of women writers in America. So do we, but another time...
...thousand-pound alligators lurch out of the water to snap their jaws around dead chickens suspended from a wire. For connoisseurs of arcane Americana, the Orlando area also offers an Alligatorland Safari Zoo (feed the animals with Purina Monkey Chow), a Reptile World Serpentarium ("Time your visit to be present during one of our three daily venom programs") and an Elvis Presley Museum, with displays of Elvis' high school yearbook (his major was shop), a portrait of Jesus that Elvis gave his parents when he was 15 and, for 50 cents, a photostat of the King's death certificate...
...whale." (Actually there are three Shamus, one for each Sea World park.) The Shamu Celebration veers toward the icky, especially when the heavenly choir from a burger commercial sings reverently, "It's what Shamu means to you and to me." And when a trio of the behemoth's trainers present their what-I-love- about-Shamu testimonials, the onlooker half expects one of them to say, "My whale, I think I'll keep her." But it is a thrill to see a 4,000-lb. killer whale balance a human on its nose, or pirouette on point, or just swim...
...millions of dollars in relief assistance, Africa remains a continent near disaster. Besieged by natural calamities, civil wars, foreign debt of $175 billion and an explosive population growth that threatens to increase the continent's inhabitants from the present OAU count of more than 400 million to close to 2 billion by the year 2025, Africa faces a worsening nightmare. Almost a quarter of a century after most colonial powers lowered their flags for the last time in Africa, dreams of full independence have given way to hellish economic troubles...
...thus gaining an informal license to kill. Yet even here Brickman cannot resist his best impulses; he makes his villain (the subtle John Mahoney) more a man befuddled under pressure than evil incarnate. And he permits Mathewson to evolve from absentminded professor into a hero who is morally all present and accounted...