Word: sands
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...venal scoundrel. Hyams' cynical fantasies about the space program are an especially amusing treat. He suggests, with malicious wit, that NASA'S space walks could actually have taken place on Earth: indeed, he demonstrates that for the price of a video camera and a few buckets of sand, any American can take a giant step for mankind in the privacy of his own home...
...desecrated America. Its obverse, as the Crescent weaves its whistling way south toward summer, is a varied, often startlingly beautiful landscape of feathery woods and forests, roses and rhododendrons, pastures and cornfields, laced with urgent streams and dreaming lakes. The earth turns from New Jersey silt to Maryland sand, from Georgia red clay to Alabama's black bottom. Grand estates and hardscrabble farms rush by, punctuated by hamlets as dour as a Grant Wood visage. The voyager is voyeur, peering into the discrete life of the land and its inhabitants...
Created in 1831 by King Louis-Philippe, the legion was conceived as a force of foreign mercenaries battling for France abroad. Declared Louis's Minister of War: "So they wish to fight -then let them bleed and shovel sand in the conquest of North Africa." The legionnaires spearheaded France's colonial ambitions-conquering Algeria, subduing Morocco, then going on to incursions in Mexico and Indochina. In victory, the legion created a legend. In 1837, one battalion seized the supposedly impenetrable Algerian citadel of Constantine, perched atop a 1,000-ft. crag. Half a century later, another Foreign Legion...
...descendant of cultured Germans, Henry Louis was raised in a complacent atmosphere. But he was born with sand under his skin, and the works of Nietzsche exerted an irresistible appeal. Mencken became a believer in the Übermensch, a scoffer at the great unwashed. Like Oscar Wilde, he made a success by reversing traditions. To believers, he played the village atheist. To prohibitionists, he was a beery provocateur. To the U.S. at large, he was an intellectual who saw culture only in Europe. "The average citizen of a democracy," he announced, "is a goose-stepping ignoramus ... The average democratic politician...
...scorching sun roasts the skeletons of jacaranda trees. The soil, dry and hard, looks like baked clay. Rivers, once navigated by 5,000-ton ships, are now so choked by sand bars that a canoe can barely nose through. Bridges cross dry gulches overgrown with weeds and shrubs. Many once plentiful plants and birds are gone, and human beings who live there are disfigured by skin cancer. The scene is 300 sq. mi. in the Brazilian state of Espirito Santo, a once lush strip north of Rio de Janeiro that is now on its way to becoming a desert...