Word: prosaic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect." Eric Hoffer, the philosopher-longshoreman has a more prosaic but very pragmatic description: "The day-to-day competence of the workingman." He adds: "If I said I was loading ships for Mother America, even during a war, I would be laughed off the docks. In Russia, they can't build an outhouse without having a parade and long speeches. This...
...several of Pike's deceased friends emerging from "a great massive light." Some skeptics were unkind enough to suggest that Pike might have used this pipeline to the beyond to clear up his doubts about such doctrines as the Trinity and Virgin Birth, but the conversations were rather prosaic. A chat between Pike and his predecessor as Bishop of California, the Rt. Rev. Karl Block, dwelled on the problems of buying church property. An exchange with the late father of British theologian Donald MacKinnon elicited the helpful information that MacKinnon once owned two cats...
...greatest pressure on the singles is the classic one-loneliness. In prosaic terms, this is coming back to an apartment where the breakfast dishes are still unwashed, the morning paper exactly where it was dropped, where nothing has moved. Mayo Mohs, a freelance journalist still single at 33, puts the unmarried's problem in a frame of reference that is more romantic and more telling: "The lack a single person feels most acutely is when he leaves his group to go off somewhere on a trip, one of those trips that his single status lets him enjoy...
Lewis scarcely nods toward the more prosaic functions of autobiography. He comes onstage at 30, blithely, without mention of past or parents or education. Much of the book is devoted to his encounters with writers, government figures, Mayfair snobs and rich art patronesses. There are adequate but curiously distant sections on World War I and its aftermath. But it was the war of words, in which he could choose the issues and the weapons, that Lewis relished most. So will his readers...
...superiority of Manhattan parks, ghettos and delicatessens. Tom Wolfe, a Yale Ph. D. in American Studies who has become a kind of Boswell of hip New York, contributes a scathing parody of a stranger's introduction to the city; a poet, George Dickerson, produces a remarkably prosaic, candid analysis of New York women. Occasionally, local color shifts into caricature, and the book is too breezy and cranky to serve as a visitor's only guide. It is fine as a complement to Kate Simon's New York Places and Pleasures...