Word: timbuktu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...carry the freeze-dried smallpox vaccine and keep diluent solutions refrigerated. Inoculating people who live in towns and villages is relatively easy. Far tougher is trapping the nomads who wander across the map. To intercept them, the epidemiologists plot their seasonal visits to water holes and waylay them there. Timbuktu, the Sahara's ancient crossroads for commerce, is now a prime hunting ground for vaccinators...
This cruelly candid self-assessment appears in the remembrance of his nephew Robin, who is himself a novelist (The Servant, The Slaves of Timbuktu). And although the effect is morbid, it is by far the best part of the book, which is otherwise devoted to a soporific account of the family genealogy. Death watches can be questioned on grounds of taste, but it is certainly true that Willie Maugham did not die well...
Mary of your readers thought that the front-page story on the Harvard Graduate School of Education's new tower was a bad joke, or a slur on the school, or both. True, the architect's sketch looked somewhat like the Timbuktu town hall or a crusaders' citadel along the Damacsus road, but the drawing was done by a respected Houston firm, which has planned a red brick veneer to harmonize with Cambridge style and sensibilities...
...Infidels! You have dared to enter the Forbidden City of Timbuktu...
...also showed slides picturing Sudanese obelisks taller than those built by the Pharoahs, knights in armor roaming Africa at the time of the Age of Chivalry in Europe, and the famous University at Timbuktu...