Word: sheerly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Today's capitalist economies undoubtedly benefit from powerful corporations. The sheer size of modern economies and the vast number of skills that must be marshaled to design and produce such products as color-TV sets and computers?to say nothing of space rockets?make any yearning for Adam Smith's world of individual entrepreneurs an exercise in pointless nostalgia...
...rarely equaled example of the detached scholar's ability to explain and influence the world of affairs. Smith's absorption in economics, which he called "political oeconomy," was a product of sheer intellectual curiosity. That curiosity led him to read everything that he could find about money, to study statutes on trade, interview businessmen and visit workshops (The Wealth of Nations opens with a detailed description of a pin factory)-but not to practice what he preached. Though he considered the desire to accumulate wealth an overwhelmingly powerful motive for humanity in general, he chose for himself what...
...these volumes amply demonstrate, the mystery remains a classic summer solace-and something more. For each book stubbornly disputes Edmund Wilson's famous grumble that thriller reading is "a kind of vice that for sheer silliness and minor harmfulness, rates between crossword puzzles and smoking." At its rare and satisfying best, the well-wrought detective story puts its readers in mind of an older critic, Thomas De Quincey, who once ventured a thesis of "Murder as One of the Fine Arts...
...more often, Alvarez's characters simply have nothing to say. Lack of raw imagination is no mortal sin, and there are other things to build novels on. But the sheer vacuousness of this book often verges on self-parody doubly so because the narrator is always there, reading off every inane thought. This from Sam, during fellatio...
...would be willing to admit that there is more at work here than sheer greed. The Bicentennial Commission's decision to split the festivities between a number of cities was of course a politic one--maximize the number of places where people can spend money, spread the wealth, and make everyone happy except maybe a few crackpot citizens who don't want hordes of tourists tramping over their community). But it was also an appropriate decision because it recognized the need to bring into all this Bicentennialia as many people as possible. If you don't bring them in, they...