Word: traces
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...imminence of death and of obliteration. Watching with wonder the futile efforts of his energetic wife and his former business partners at garden-keeping and money-making respectively, he feels keenly his own life's ineffectuality and transience. "What is wrong with me that I want to leave a trace...?" he demands. Writing, he hopes, will save him, will keep him in the memory of those who follow. But what is the use, Updike coyly forces us to wonder, of remaining in the literature of a waning species...
...contrary, like the lightweight plastic snow shovels which so delight Ben Turnbull, Updike is one thing which persuades us that "the world does not only get worse."Photo courtesy of KnoJOHN UPDIKE '54 has done it again: luxuriant lyricism and good, clean fun with more than a trace of smut...
Smart, young urbanite Marcy (Janeane Garofalo) works for a Boston senator up for reelection. Having troubles in his campaign, the JFK wannabe assigns young Marcy to go back to the "old country"--Ireland--and trace his hereditary roots. Young Marcy arrives in a small, unheard of Irish town (where men have singing competitions and buses are still gender-segregated) at the peak of a quaint annual ritual: The Match-making Festival. Being single, Marcy is a marked woman; a lamb laid out to the wolves...
...What makes an atomic disaster so unlikely? Heat-resistant ceramic jackets around each plutonium pellet, which can easily withstand the temperature of reentry and the force of an explosion. If the system does fail, Cassini's opponents warn, trace amounts of plutonium could be inhaled and cause cancers of the lung, bone and liver. NASA's response: the average exposure would equal about 2 millirems over 50 years, a dose so mild that it makes standing next to your microwave look dangerous...
...rest of Underworld, eventually coming to rest in the possession of Nick Shay, an executive with a waste-management firm in Phoenix, Ariz., who pays $34,500 to a New Jersey memorabilia dealer named Marvin Lundy for the Thomson souvenir. Why buy something that even the seller cannot authoritatively trace back to Bobby Thomson's bat? (DeLillo's readers know about Cotter Martin and can make the connection, but his characters can't.) Why, especially, since Nick was a teenager in the Bronx and a desperate Dodgers fan when the home run was hit? "It's not about Thomson hitting...