Word: recent
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Indeed, Armageddon is something of a growth industry. In an avalanche of recent books, polar caps melt, a new ice age begins, the oceans disappear, the ozone level is destroyed, terrorists touch off a nuclear war, astronauts bring back a deadly Andromeda Strain. Destruction may also come from a maddened god (Gore Vidal's Kalki). Or in an unending snowstorm (George Stone's Blizzard). Or from the scorching "greenhouse effect" of too much CO2 in the atmosphere (Arthur Herzog's Heat). Or through global political disintegration (The Third World War: August 1985 by a group of English...
...scientists write only for one another, usually in terms all but incomprehensible to lay people, word of new theories and breakthroughs is sometimes passed on to the public in overly dramatic and exaggerated form. Still, the most deadpan writing cannot disguise the drama of some of science's recent discoveries. The Big Bang theory of the universe, for example, has quite correctly convinced much of the public that the cosmos is unimaginably terrifying and violent. In the light of such findings, even theories that have been repudiated by the scientific community, like those of former...
...Historian Andrée Conrad sees disastermania in sociological terms. In a recent review of 20 catastrophe books for the quarterly Book Forum, she argued that disaster writing and entertainment are safety valves for hostility toward a complicated culture. Says Conrad: "For one exhilarating and guilt-free moment, the whole teeming supermarket cart of capitalist goodies is sent hurtling down the aisle and crashes through the façade." The films, in her view, also ease the dread of death, since there is comfort in knowing that everyone almost always dies together. Concludes Conrad: "The success of disaster entertainment...
...about the world's end. Psychics and E.S.P. fanciers, for instance, have dusted off the 1934 predictions of Edgar Cayce: he forecast upheavals at the poles, the sinking of most of Japan into the sea, and the destruction of Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. In his recent book We Are the Earthquake Generation, Jeffrey Goodman explains that the latterday mystics are generally agreed that worldwide destruction will occur between 1990 and 2000 by earthquakes, tsunamis and floods; then John the Baptist will announce the Second Coming...
...American Woman is female, Neil Amberson, the top editor, is decidedly male, a discount sultan who sleeps with all of his editors once, then keeps them wondering why he didn't ask for seconds. Sara does get a return visit, in some of the raunchiest sex scenes in recent fiction, but it is all for nothing. She has misjudged who really has control of the magazine. Neil is on his way out, and Helene, his foul-mouthed assistant, is on her way in, exhaling the dragon's breath of women...