Word: utopias
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Leech's "Utopia on the Rocks-British Socialism in Action" was a readable but superficial, highly editorialized and sparsely documented roundup of the crisis.What Journalist Leech had set out to prove was that most of the blame for Britain's plight lay on the Labor government and its Socialism. What he proved more sharply was that Britons had been largely unaware of the rising tide of criticism of the Labor government and the new crisis. They had been brushing off attacks as mere Tory politicking, were shocked to discover that many of the same criticisms were being made...
Honest Joe Lockman was distressed when he discovered that his destination, Utopia, wasn't marked on his Socony Automobile Guide. But Joe enjoyed a good gag, and when he checked up on the mysterious region he was tickled to find that it derived from the Greek ou (not) and topos (a place...
...Notaplace, get it?" he chuckled to his wife Eva-though with a sinking heart, because he knew that poor Eva, whose life depended on a well-ordered battery of labor-saving devices, was probably not going to relish the simple life of Utopia one bit. Only what she and Joe took to be the advancing shadow of World War III had scared her into agreeing to pull up her bourgeois roots and join him in the new colony being formed on a New England mountaintop...
...split between the active but lowbrow man-in-the-street and the wrangling but ineffectual man-of-intellect that Author McCarthy spins her tale. In McCarthy's fable, the incidents of everyday life on the mountaintop soon show that the split is in fact a bridgeless gulf, and Utopia itself a creation without foundations-doomed not so much by "history" as by the colonists' inability to produce "a commodity more tangible than morality" and hopeful...
...sparkles very nicely as long as she is standing the false gods of contemporary intellectualism on their heads and displaying her theory-ridden victims against a backdrop composed of the simple facts of life. Nonetheless, most of The Oasis has just the same fatal flaw as the Utopia it describes-it is built entirely of disembodied ideas and peopled with puppets. As an intellectual essay it tinkles some pretty bells, but as fiction it is about as robust and complete as a lopped-off head...