Word: tracts
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...sort of overheated sideshow that the saints in heaven were permitted to watch in order to "enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly." To the poet Shelley it was "a city much like London." To Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, whose most celebrated theatrical tract can now be seen in a free cinemadaptation, hell is just a cheap hotel room...
...border, rugged Philippe Lamour migrated to Paris as a young man, became a successful lawyer and politician. In 1940, along with other Parisians, he fled south ahead of the Nazi panzers. Lamour never went back. He stopped running in the Midi town of Bellegarde, bought a rundown, 115-acre tract known as "The Farm of the Partridge," and settled down. At war's end, he added 50 more acres, traded in his horses for tractors and successfully grew strawberries and cauliflower in an area previously wedded to wine...
...best-known work, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), the bitter saga of the Okies, was powerful as a tract but limited as fiction, scarcely able to survive its time and place. Even in less dated novels. Steinbeck's characters are not, as Edmund Wilson once wrote, "really quite human beings: they are cunning little living dolls that amuse us as we might be amused by pet guinea pigs, squirrels or rabbits...
...novel triumphs because it is a beautifully rendered love story and not a tract on alcoholism. More important than the man's falls from the wagon are his stubborn returns to sobriety and his fierce determination to be worthy of the woman and himself. He fails ultimately, going down again and again before the woman finally gives up her futile attempts at rescue. But only hope has faded; love has not. "He's like a child." she thinks at the end, watching the deterioration of his mind and body. But she adds: "If you have a child whose...
...have increased enormously before the first flights begin. Their urgent concern now is to prepare launching facilities with which to make those flights. Technical direction of the program will eventually come from the Manned Spacecraft Center, 36 miles southeast of Houston. At present, NASA's 1,600-acre tract of rangeland (formerly part of the J. M. West ranch) looks like a playground for bulldozers. Little actual building has started, but eventually the area will have laboratories, office buildings, and massive test communications and control facilities...