Word: sharpness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Handlin has sharp words for those who have fallen prey to the theory-without-evidence mode of historical accounting. He believes in sticking to the facts--even though at times the "provable facts" were actually incorrect. Works such as U.B. Phillips' American Negro Slavery, written in 1929, distorted the facts of history when they included as a "proven fact" that blacks were racially inferior. Although we are never told quite why, Handlin finds these illusions forgivable...
...fierce black horse there ere was strutted to the front. His armor was a bright puke green, and shone like an emerald in the sun. His armor was a bright puke green, and shone like an emerald in the sun. His lance was as long as his sword was sharp, and his shield bore the emblem of a mug. He was known as the Knight of Delta Pi Epsilon...
...twenties, lean, slight, light-skinned, freckled, pale-eyed, sharp-faced. He wears round wire-rimmed spectacles like Bertolt Brecht's and a bush of red hair teased out as if in ongoing electrocution. His chin and lips are hairless. No hippie he, his clothes are rumpled but clean, plain, even severe: in Ambrose's phrase, he dresses like a minor member of the North Korean U.N. delegation...
...Soviet military buildup on an offshore island uncomfortably close to home. Sharp internal disagreement among rival politicians and policymakers over just how much of a "threat" the buildup posed. Government demands for a Soviet withdrawal, brusquely rejected by Moscow...
McMahon's book is a marvel of brains, brevity and sharp description. He flashes around like a lightning bug briefly casting a glow on some detail or other: what it's like to travel on the Erie Canal: how a character is inadvertently shot; the way in which daguerreotypes are made. He does a lot with bees too, but. as the book implies, they have enough metaphorical possibilities for a series of novels. A hive is a feminist state, with an automatic system for keeping warm that is activated when the temperature in the hive drops...