Word: troy
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...WHAT DO TROY, Renaissance Rome, the English parliament of the eighteenth century and America in the 1960s have in common? Each had leaders who led their countries to disaster, and each is the subject of a chapter in historian Barbara W. Tuchman's new book The March of Folly...
...policy was perceived as folly in its own time, that a sensible alternative was available, and that the policy nonetheless was carried out by a group over more than one political lifetime. She makes one exception to that last criterion, the brief episode of the wooden horse at Troy...
...evidence that such folly "is an old and inherent human habit." But her purpose seems deeper. The tale, told most memorably by Vergil in the Aeneid, portrays the Trojans as victims of fate. Despite the urgings of citizens that the Greek gift be destroyed or at least broken open, Troy's leaders take it in, hidden Greeks and all, because the gods have so ordained. That excuse will not do for Tuchman. "The gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind," she writes. "The gods' interference . is man's device for transferring...
...clarity and grace of her elegant sentences, spinning out images of the past that took the reader to the scene. In this new enterprise she sometimes seems too much in a hurry to pause for that valuable indulgence. Her dense, rapid-fire synopsis of the siege and fall of Troy is, inexplicably, almost as wooden as the horse. Her enthusiastic expedition into papal territory (where she solemnly scolds, but obviously admires, the ferocious warrior-Pope Julius II) stops dead for impenetrable paragraphs dealing with Renaissance politics. The sharply polemical tone in the Viet Nam section undermines the intended message...
...greater the emphasis here is on grades, in our opinion, the less it is on learning," said Troy Haas, chairman of the student government's Education Committee. "The amount of learning and grades simply do not track together," he added...