Word: snail
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Lives, Bernard Malamud Sleepless Nights, Elizabeth Hardwick -Good as Gold, Joseph Heller - SS-GB, Len Deighton -The Best American Short Stories 1978, edited by Ted Solotaroff NONFICTION: Billy Graham, Marshall Frady -Confessions of a Conservative, Garry Wills -The Eighth Day of Creation, Horace Freeland Judson -The Medusa and the Snail, Lewis Thomas -The Powers That Be, David Halberstam The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris -To Set the Record Straight, John J. Sirica
Such imaginative leaps are typical throughout The Medusa and the Snail. Though the book is about science, its form is a demonstration of art. In fact, a Thomas essay blooms organically in much the same manner as a romantic ode or sonnet. A receptive mind encounters something in nature; the object out there is gradually drawn into the thinking subject; reflection occurs, hypotheses are put forward and tested, a pulse of excitement becomes audible; suddenly, everything coalesces, time stands still for a moment, an image is born out of matter and spirit. If Wordsworth had gone to medical school...
...some of them as well. The rest of his life was his to live out in dignified, influential isolation. There was no reason to believe that any work bearing Thomas' name would ever appear on paperback racks in airports or drugstores. But then, as The Medusa and the Snail indicates, there is no reason for expecting many things to happen until they do; only then can the moving forces behind events leap into clarity...
...done enough. He said that he wanted me to continue and persuaded me that I should, so I did." Very shortly afterward, Thomas' column began attracting a cult of pass-along readers. The evolution that led to The Lives of a Cell and The Medusa and the Snail had begun...
...says of his work. "It's just plain fun learning some thing that you didn't know . . . There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded." He is still astonished at things that others, mistakenly, take for granted. Why, he muses in The Medusa and the Snail, did people make such a fuss over the test-tube baby in England? The true miracle was, as always, the union of egg and sperm and the emergence of a cell that can grow into a human brain. "The mere existence of that cell," he writes, "should...