Word: twain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...NIGGER" is a word we don't hear very often. Occassionally it is whispered as part of an insensitive joke. We read it in the pages of Twain's Huckleberry Finn as a solemn reminder of a past we are too embarrassed to remember. It is a harsh and frightening word that we would much rather forget. Moreover, in the year that Rev. Jesse Jackson became a legitimate political figure in the eyes of most Americans, hearing the word reminds us of how easy it is for us to ignore the racial discrimination that continues to persist in this nation...
...Kitty Dukakis' father, retired associate director of the Boston Pops Harry Ellis Dickson, Fanfare for Michael Dukakis was a freeze-dried composition by Corporate Composer John Williams, also responsible for NBC's bloated theme song. Dubbed Fanfare for a Son-in-Law, the piece brings to mind Mark Twain's crack about Wagner's music being "better than it sounds...
...Mark Twain never saw anything like this. When he piloted on the river more than a century ago, he wrote mostly about storms and floods and the excess water curving and shifting over banks and through new channels. He knew, though, the majesty of the great valley. "The basin of the Mississippi is the body of the nation," is the description that starts his classic river chronicle. That remains true today and is reason for the profound concern...
When God created the American West, to paraphrase Mark Twain, he provided plenty of whiskey to drink and just enough water to fight over. In Twain's day, the Forty-Niners feuded with fists and pistols over who could divert which Sierra streams to separate gold from gravel. In the teens and Roaring Twenties, thirsty young Los Angeles brashly laid claim to a snow-fed mountain river, piped it 230 miles south to the city and dispatched armed guards to protect the aqueduct from outraged locals wielding dynamite...
...contrast, Twain's letters show a simmering distaste for politicians and a maturing affection for the family he left behind. When his younger brother Henry is fatally wounded in a steamboat explosion, the youthful Clemens rushes to his side. He "prayed as never man prayed before," he writes his sister, "that the great God . . . would pour out the fulness of his just wrath upon my wicked head, but have mercy, mercy, mercy upon that unoffending...