Word: snow
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Snow...
When C.P. Snow was an eight-year-old in the drab Midlands city of Leicester, he read about the atom in a children's encyclopedia. An atom, the credulous lad was told, resembles the ulterior of a cathedral, in which tennis balls-the electrons-bounce about violently. This fanciful account gave the factory clerk's son "the first sharp mental excitement I ever had." He never quite got over...
...plot that Snow the ex-physicist unfolds in this posthumously published work of nonfiction is better than any that Snow the novelist invented in his romans à clef like The Search and The New Men. There is something marvelously Dickensian, for instance, about Ernest Rutherford, whose booming voice upset such sensitive instruments as Niels Bohr, the Henry James of atomic physics, who whispered his way through labyrinths of elegant theory to explain what Rutherford demonstrated. Then, with Einstein ("the best company of all the great physicists") hovering above the scene, the rest of Snow's pantheon is Introduced...
...production focuses on the very characters modern readers of Nicholas Nickleby find to be pasteboard cliches of middle-class sentimentality: noble Nicholas, snow-white Kate, wounded faun Smike?and makes their stodgy virtues real and comprehensible. It renounces the fey modernism of camp; it takes a stand, grows tall in its righteousness, infuses the audience with its passion, brings Dickens back to life not as a carver of curios but as a man who, in George Orwell's phrase, "is generously angry...
...here and now: Rabbit's merchandise ("Like a little sea of melting candy his cars bake in the sun"); a swimming pool ("lit from underneath at night as if it has swallowed the moon"); a moment in January ("It is cold, a day that might bring snow, a day that feels hollow"). These moments, and many others like them, shed radiance on Rabbit and his surroundings, the very glow of transcendence that this overweight car salesman still, stubbornly, thinks of as his birthright. He does not always see it, but Updike's readers are granted this vision...