Word: silk
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Controlling a strategic juncture where the Silk Route crossed the Euphrates River, the city of Zeugma was one of the Roman Empire's easternmost outposts--until it was torched by Persian invaders in A.D. 252. But like the eruption that buried Pompeii two centuries earlier, the fire preserved a trove of mosaics, statuary and villas. Now Zeugma faces destruction again, this time from rising floodwaters of a hydroelectric project. "It is a wall-to-wall carpet of mosaics, richer and more important than Pompeii," laments archaeologist Mehmet Onal. For a brief moment last week, Turkish officials hinted that the ruins...
...Nobel Prize in 1976. Like Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet and The Dean's December, The Human Stain makes a good case for the decline of humanism, civility and common sense. Roth also gives us a bleak look beneath the surface of the nation's current self-satisfaction. Silk's off-campus troubles include an affair with Faunia Farley, a 34-year-old janitor who is crazed because her two children were killed in a house fire while she was having sex in the driveway. Les, her estranged husband, must add that anguish to his tormenting memories of Vietnam...
...Coleman Silk is not a character who invites easy sympathy. But by the time Roth finishes with him, pity is not out of the question. Roth's veteran mouthpiece, Nathan Zuckerman, tells Silk's story from the perspective of 1998. The nation is blanketed by the Clinton-Lewinsky dalliance, and Zuckerman is not amused. "The righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band...to enact the astringent rituals of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch...
...years earlier, Silk, dean at a small liberal-arts college in western Massachusetts, had his own purification problems. He was forced to resign after inciting the guardians of politically correct usage. "Does anyone know these people?" he asks his class about two no-show students. "Do they exist or are they spooks...
They do, and they are African Americans. The 70-year-old dean is branded as a racist, which is a bitter irony. Since graduating from Howard University as a "Negro" (black by birth, his skin is "white as snow," according to his mother), Silk has passed as a Jewish intellectual...