Word: understands
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...said Village Voice Columnist Alexander Cockburn. On the final afternoon of the three-day affair, the delegates rather selfconsciously voted to insert "alternative" into the association's name. IF. Stone, the archetype of maverick journalists, picked up on their discomfiture in his keynote speech that night: "I understand you have qualms about being called alternatives, and after looking at your papers, I must say you've got the most bland kind of alternative. You don't try to change the world, you just titillate...
SAWHILL: Conservation is the one initiative that the American people can accept, understand and do something about. Low prices for oil have sent the wrong signals to people. Higher prices will convince people that we have a problem...
IRONICALLY just these observations allow the reader to understand what Matthiessen means and how he can come by his beliefs and his escapes. The Himalayan world he depicts is the enactment of his religion. Seen through Western eyes the Himalayan people calmly progress through prayers and days alike, buffetted by little and infrequently alarmed. Their life isn't meaningless, but neither is its meaning marked. It just is, which is precisely Matthiessen's point...
...murder without a murderer--which he infuses with an inventive twist of probability theory. Civilization has grown so complex, he maintains, that it is governed only by laws of random chance. As a result, the protagonist--and the reader--is alienated from the reality he thinks he can understand and control. In the depersonalized modern world, common sense has become nearly meaningless. The effect is eerie and sobering...
...portion of this short novel consists of meticulous descriptions of the victims and the circumstances of their deaths, making The Chain of Chance both a forensic pathologist's delight and a challenge to armchair sleuths, because, hidden among the barrage of details are the clues to this mystery. To understand them one might have to be pre-med, but the novel's tendency toward the arcane does not greatly detract from its suspense or from the fascination of its conclusion...