Word: swiss
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ready for the daily double if you responded: 1) Who is Claude Francois Denecourt, nicknamed "le Silvain"? 2) What is Mons Pilatus in the Swiss Alps? and 3) What is Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama? Author of iconoclastic, groundbreaking studies of the French Revolution (Citizens) and the Netherlands during its 17th century Golden Age (The Embarrassment of Riches), Schama is one of those rare, imaginative historians who do more than impose order on the known past. He introduces readers to a kind of yesteryear they never dreamed existed...
Demonizing the Alps, however, was far from universal. The naturalist Conrad Gesner, who climbed Mons Pilatus in 1555 to disprove its diabolic reputation, thought of the Alps as the "work of the Sovereign Architect." To 19th century Romantics, the Swiss mountains were symbols of virtue, and the herdsmen who dwelt there paradigms of primitive democracy. Thus the Alps through history have been rather like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates: you never know what meaning you'll find inside them...
...hero of Mark Helprin's new novel (Harcourt Brace; 514 pages; $24) has been, variously, a U. S. fighter pilot, a billionaire, a bank robber, a convicted killer and an inmate in a Swiss sanatorium. But what he is most is a bit of a nut, which he demonstrates principally through his lifelong war against the evils of coffee.TIME critic John Skowsays "If there is a trouble with Helprin's writing, it is that readers may have come by now to expect little more than to be dazzled every few pages....They certainly will be in Antproof, a wonderfully strange...
...Faustus character, Peter Prideau, a Peabody Professor of Christian Morals over at the Divinity School, inadvertently discovers a demon while fiddling with new software called "Cybernectromantics." Desperate to see his deceased wife, Laura, once more, Prideau makes a deal with the demon, nicking his finger with the proffered Swiss army knife and bartering his soul for a meeting with his beloved...
Opening Cuba to Castro's way of capitalism involves valuable dollars and hard currency that would most likely end up in private Swiss bank accounts. Few Cubans benefit. Whether the embargo is helping Castro or hurting, we can only guess. What is sure is that Cubans struggle each day to scrounge food for their families. The idea of starting a revolution is far from their minds...