Word: waxing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...bidding of a dental-health educator, the kids chomped energetically on a wad of flavored wax. When the wax had done its job of stimulating a free flow of saliva, the dentist collected a saliva sample from each child and mixed it with a special reagent. Within a few minutes, the samples showed a variety of colors. These color changes, according to an inventive biochemist, Dr. Gustav W. Rapp of Chi cago's Loyola University, predict whether a child is likely to develop a lot of tooth cavities. The colors (from an enzyme in the saliva) will indicate...
...Wax Boom, by George Mandel. The strange story of an infantry company that longed compulsively for light in the darkness of combat...
...Wax Boom, by George Mandel. The strange story of an infantry company that longed compulsively for light in the darkness of combat...
Tough, able Sergeant Riglioni, himself only fitfully rational, blurredly watches the breakup. It takes the form of a mania for light. At night, huddled sleeplessly in bomb-crushed cellars, the men crave candles. They try scraping wax from ration boxes, but the lights they make burn only for seconds. Then a replacement shows up, squeamish in combat but eerily skillful at finding large quantities of wax. He guards his secret, but the obsessed men find it out: the wax comes from holy figures in household shrines and churches...
Mandel handles the deadly light with only a minimum of the writing-class prose that is standard in novels of this kind. The rich symbolism of the search for wax never becomes cant, even when the soldiers learn that the wax comes from melted saints. The Wax Boom is a commendable book, and, if predicament-describing were the main task of a novelist, it would be an excellent...