Word: thor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Though this insight is urgent, the au thor never belabors it. Instead of preaching about interdependence, Janovy celebrates the simple delights of a naturalist: discovering a creek full of snails or a marsh full of flies, observing a colony of birds and musing that "the individual cliff swallow is the philosophical equivalent of a single cell of the multicellular colony-organism," realizing that every good biologist must also be a philosopher. "The biologist," he concludes, "approaches nature in the form of a plant or animal and immediately begins asking questions about the innermost soul, the innermost characteristics, the true spectrum...
...METAPHOR which Gardner places like a frame around his book acts in this way. On the first page he tells a story from Norse myth: Thor, Woden and the gods must fight off the trolls, the forces of chaos, but the only weapon remaining to them is Thor's hammer. For us, Gardner says, that hammer is art. Writers must take it up and strike, before the Gotterdammerung. The tale acts as a light, disarming way to begin a book with such a solemn title. But from the first pages forward Gardner relies on the logical force of this tale...
...light." But Gardner lacks the formal power, the rhetorical skill which Arnold employed to make the abstract palatable and comprehensible. Gardner's book is structureless. The divisions between chapters are arbitrary, and just about the only overall element of the book that seems planned is the appearance of Thor's hammer at start and finish...
...peak in their nearest state park-are likely to agree with Jerome's paeans to the joys of topography. "Wonder and delight await, up there," he says. So does "elbowroom for the soul." Even those who have never left sea level will enjoy the au thor's lofty musings. Jerome points out that a range like the Himalayas is still growing (Everest may be more than a foot harder to climb in a hundred years than it is today) and explains mountain weather with a clarity some science writers would do well to emylate. He speaks knowledgeably...
Clancy Nixon and captain Mark Panarese lost, 3-1, to Thor Kayeum and Bill Fisher, respectively...