Word: socialism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...deliciously comic novel. Ha Jin, who left his native China in 1985 to study at Brandeis University and then remained in the U.S., tells this tale in an impeccably deadpan manner. He casts a wise, rather than a cold, eye on his characters' struggles, both with an inflexible social system and their own weaknesses. With two earlier collections of stories and a novella, Ha Jin attracted notice as a guide to a world few outside China know. His first novel, which has been nominated for a National Book Award, makes local color intimately familiar...
...slow pacing, reverent interviewees, soothing strings and custardy voice-overs. It may seem harsh to call this sentimental and dull, but something in this pledge-drive-friendly aesthetic belittles the films' intense, contentious subjects. The suffrage movement was ardent and revolutionary; what we get sounds like an ice cream social...
...overlook depression. Social isolation or the death of friends and family can shatter anyone's mental state but is particularly difficult to bear with advancing age. Even patients with clear-cut dementia and depression are less confused when their depression is treated...
...share this interest in infertile, social sex with a few other species: dolphins, bonobo apes and some birds. But even if sex is too good for human beings to give up, more and more people will abandon it as a means of reproduction. Many people born from in-vitro techniques are themselves infertile--they inherit the infertility from their genetic parents. So infertility is bound to increase, and with it the demand for IVF. Add to this the demand from gay men and women and from those with private eugenic motives--ranging from not wanting to pass on inherited disease...
Meat, it seems, is not just food but reward as well. But in the coming century, that will change. Much as we have awakened to the full economic and social costs of cigarettes, we will find we can no longer subsidize or ignore the costs of mass-producing cattle, poultry, pigs, sheep and fish to feed our growing population. These costs include hugely inefficient use of freshwater and land, heavy pollution from livestock feces, rising rates of heart disease and other degenerative illnesses, and spreading destruction of the forests on which much of our planet's life depends...