Word: towers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...future, let TIME properly evaluate the ivory tower musings of the New York pundits...
...TOWER OF BABEL (427 pp.)-Ellas Conetti, translated by C. V. Wedgwood-Alfred Knopf...
Most American readers may well dare to deny The Tower of Babel's genius; few will deny its supreme madness or be deaf to its screams and bellows. Its principal character, Dr. Peter Kien, is the world's prime authority on Chinese, Japanese and Indian manuscripts. As a schoolboy prodigy, "in one minute Kien had memorized ∏ to 65 decimal places." As a grown-up scholar, he lives in solitude, utterly shut off from the world by the tomes of his magnificent library, wholly dedicated to pedantry. One sad day, this sexless, infantile genius decides to marry...
From this point on, The Tower of Babel becomes a ghastly sequence of horrors- or, as some may see it, a small-scale presentation of the fate of pure intellect in the clutches of today's harsh world. Slowly, inexorably, the new Mrs. Kien invades her hapless husband's ivory tower, teams up with the brutal janitor of the building to throw Kien out and sell his priceless library. Half-crazy, half-beaten to a pulp by his elephantine wife, Kien runs out into the streets-of which he is as ignorant as a babe-and takes shelter...
...receipts have hitched onto a fast-ascending skyrocket. What once passed for friendly "amateur" sport can no longer escape the commercial aroma of its play-for-play brethren, whose breeding grounds must still exist upon the college and school level. Rather than set themselves up in some ivory academic tower, colleges have let the lure of lucre seep down among them, and have usually welcomed with open arms such money-making orgies as the fast-multiplying bowl games on New Year...