Word: vastness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Collectionitis is as pervasive as inflation, as euphoric as a drug high. Its grip reaches far beyond the roseate world of Rembrandts, Sèvres porcelain and Georgian silver. A vast subculture of acquisition is feeding on scarce objects of every conceivable description. Britons are busily unearthing-and auctioneers as busily selling-such objects of dubious virtue as antique typewriters, gramophones and biscuit tins. Americans, with more catholic taste for trivia, have enshrined such unlovely objets trouvés as old flyswatters, orange reamers, apple parers, Kraft cheese jars (a.k.a. "swanky swigs"), Mickey Mousiana, player pianos, Coke bottle tops, beer...
...implication, from everything else ever painted by Velázquez, turning it from one painting among others into a dead whale on a flatcar, a curiosity to be gawped at. To most people visiting the Met, Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, bought amid vast publicity in 1961 for $2.3 million, is still "the two-million-dollar Rembrandt." It is removed, none too subtly, from all other Rembrandts. In the meantime, the clichés of art appreciation-"masterpiece," "genius," "deep humanity," "quality," "values" and the rest of that fustian-become, in the face of a spiraling...
...life. Yet Piers Paul Read, 38, puts a lot of his native English on this familiar pitch. He knows, as most chroniclers of Me Decade shenanigans do not, that private acts have public consequences; in the great tradition of British novelists, he draws society as a delicate, vast spider web, tuned to vibrate at the lightest footfall or breath of scandal. In addition, Read is a self-described "serious Catholic" and scales this novel to dimensions familiar to readers of Graham Greene: his hero's quest for fulfillment progresses not only as an item of gossip...
Everywhere, the Vietnamese and the pro-Hanoi Cambodian regime manifested a confident hold on the Cambodian land and people. According to some estimates, the 100,000 crack troops that invaded Cambodia have since been reinforced by more than another 100,000 men. In addition, the Vietnamese have trained a vast Cambodia militia. Vietnamese soldiers and Cambodian militiamen are on the move by such strangely disparate modes of transport as elephants, Soviet tanks and American-made personnel carriers, helicopters and planes captured by Hanoi after the U.S. withdrawal...
...currently engaged in 75 energy-conserving projects involving new and existing buildings. He is developing an integrated energy system for large buildings that uses wind and photovoltaic cells for generating electricity, then recaptures waste heat from the cells for heating water. The imaginative Dubin has also conceived a vast underground heating and cooling system for Washington's Market Square Development complex...