Word: samoa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...teacher and student sit cross-legged, facing each other on the floor of the open-sided hut in Western Samoa. Behind them the rain forest rises to the pinnacle of a long-dormant volcano. Beneath the thatched roof, a gaggle of children intently watches the proceedings. The teacher is Salome Isofea, 30, a young healer who is demonstrating her art. The man opposite her, a Westerner named Paul Alan Cox, is no ordinary student. He is a botany professor and dean at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, a world specialist in medicinal plants and, far from least in this...
...seller, Hell's Angels, in 1967. There are absurdly elaborate screeds to collection agencies and complaints to banks about the color of his checks. The proud highwayman wrote to William Faulkner, suggesting that the Nobel laureate send him money; to President Johnson, nominating himself for the governorship of American Samoa; to the Postmaster General, protesting the introduction of Zip Codes...
...seller, 'Hell's Angels,' in 1967. There are absurdly elaborate screeds to collection agencies and complaints to banks about the color of his checks. The proud highwayman wrote to William Faulkner, suggesting that the Nobel laureate send him money; to President Johnson, nominating himself for the governorship of American Samoa; to the Postmaster General, protesting the introduction of Zip Codes. "If the sorrow of later Thompson is that more and more of his pieces read like celebrity walkabouts at 4 a.m.," Iyer notes, "the pleasure of these letters is that they have all the rude vitality...
What isn't natural is going crazy--for sadness to linger on into debilitating depression, for anxiety to grow chronic and paralyzing. These are largely diseases of modernity. When researchers examined rural villagers in Samoa, they discovered what were by Western standards extraordinarily low levels of cortisol, a biochemical by-product of anxiety. And when a Western anthropologist tried to study depression among the Kaluli of New Guinea, he couldn't find...
When he settled for good, it was in Samoa, in a grand plantation house designed for large-scale entertaining. He wrote steadily, made more and more money, and happily or resignedly spent all of it keeping his deadbeat in-laws afloat. He died at 44, in 1894, having written his own requiem: "Under the wide and starry sky/ Dig the grave and let me lie/ Glad did I live and gladly die ..." McLynn tells his story with grace and skill, and only a dull reader will finish this biography without heading for the library to search out a complete edition...