Word: pursuits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...this renewed season of diet vows and basking on the beach, two provocative new books take out after the often maniacal American pursuit of health and the perfect physique. Professor Barsky's book, Worried Sick: Our Troubled Quest for Wellness (Little, Brown; 266 pages; $17.95), charges that Americans "don't live exuberantly but apprehensively, as if our bodies are dormant adversaries, programmed for betrayal at any moment." Another broadside comes from University of Connecticut Sociologist Barry Glassner in Bodies: Why We Look the Way We Do (And How We Feel About It) (Putnam; 288 pages; $19.95). Glassner takes America...
Authorities still have no promising leads to the identity of the serial murderer who attacked mostly prostitutes and runaways. Their disappearances were sometimes not reported until years after they were killed. The lag time has frustrated investigators, who have spent $13 million in pursuit of the slayer since the first victim was found along the Green River near Seattle in 1982. Police cling to one consoling fact: they have found no victims murdered after 1984. Since such killers rarely quit, police hope this one is either dead or already in prison...
...would seem more productive to understand the great university--say Harvard--as more of a democratizing than a democratic institution. There, ideally, are brought together peoples of all different ethnic, religious, racial and class backgrounds dedicated to what must be non-democratic principles: the pursuit of dispassionate truths and a healthy (and critical) respect for traditions and authorities that have earned our attention. Most will not stay on after their four years here, and therein lies the university's annual gift to the public world ever since enrollments opened up after World War II: a democratized, de-aristocricized corps...
...alcohol is not legal out of tragic necessity, just because Prohibition was a practical failure. Alcohol is legal because Americans like to drink. Almost all drinkers indulge their habit in moderation, with no harmful effect. Quite the reverse: alcohol is a small but genuine contribution toward their pursuit of happiness. Society has decided that the pleasure of drinking is worth the equally genuine cost to society and pain to many individuals of alcoholism, automobile accidents and so on. What's more, this social decision is correct. The world would not be a better place without booze, even if that were...
...ruling in a decision that not only reinforced existing copyright law but also limited the manner in which a writer could describe copyrighted material in his own words. Hamilton went reeling back to his writing table, and the publishing business went into a tizzy. "Biography is a legitimate literary pursuit," says Jason Epstein, Hamilton's editor at Random House. "Salinger's reluctance to be written about, if ceded, could threaten the whole genre...