Word: soiling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...conscience, and redemption through penitence. Solzhenitsyn believes that millions in the Soviet Union were accomplices in Stalin's crimes. He calls upon the entire nation to confess to the guilt of the past. "Only through the repentance of a multitude of people can the air and the soil of Russia be cleansed, so that a new, healthy national life can grow...
...Lighting was one of the highlights of that brief burst of films from Czechoslovakia that also included Loves of a Blonde and Closely Watched Trains. This is his second American feature and it betrays an addled, even desperate sensibility. Passer's talents have received scant nourishment on American soil...
...memories were often harsh. The son of a shiftless, intemperate father, Shaw began tending the hardscrabble Alabama soil almost as soon as he could walk. When he was not plowing or picking cotton, he cut and hauled timber, hacked out railroad crossties, carved ax handles, wove baskets. At 21 he married, left his servitude to his father and entered another. Few economic systems can have been as cruelly deceptive as the one saddled on black Southern sharecroppers. They leased their land from whites, who also paid for the "furnishin' "-feed, fertilizer, tools-they needed to farm. At harvesttime sharecroppers...
Troubles did not end with race. As Shaw notes, "All God's dangers ain't a white man." There was also the unyielding soil and unpredictable weather, the boll weevil, illness and wild fluctuations in the all-important price of cotton. "It's a market price," Shaw explains, "and it's set before you ever try to sell your cotton, and it's set probably before you gin your cotton and before you gather it or grow it or even plant your seed." During Shaw's prime farming years (roughly 1906 to 1932), cotton...
...slopes. The accelerated runoff caused disastrous floods over the past year. In cleared jungles in Mexico, Guatemala and Brazil, heavy rains quickly leached the nutrients from the thin layer of topsoil, rendering the land infertile within a year or two. (The trees had both anchored and nourished the soil.) In other cleared jungles, the sun burned out the soil's valuable organic content...