Word: wayes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...audiences can grant the picture its imaginative leaps, and go with its surprising tone, they will be pleasantly rewarded. The wit derives mainly from Writer-Director Meyer's wry confrontations between Futurist Wells and a world that does not in any way match his optimistic projections of things to come. Whether trying to adjust to the automobile, a Big Mac or a Mickey Mouse telephone, Wells is a consistently appealing figure. After playing lots of reprehensible characters (A Clockwork Orange) McDowell exhibits a first-rate change-up. Even more surprising is Mary Steenburgen as the junior bank officer...
...fine, small, funny second novel. McMahon is a professor of applied mechanics and biology at Harvard. Nine years ago. he wrote Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel. It told of a teen-age boy growing up among the scientists at Los Alamos. N. Mex., as they calculated their way toward the atomic bomb. Here the author sets his sights backward by 100 years to spoof the pre-Darwinian notion of nature as the beneficent servant...
McMahon's book is a marvel of brains, brevity and sharp description. He flashes around like a lightning bug briefly casting a glow on some detail or other: what it's like to travel on the Erie Canal: how a character is inadvertently shot; the way in which daguerreotypes are made. He does a lot with bees too, but. as the book implies, they have enough metaphorical possibilities for a series of novels. A hive is a feminist state, with an automatic system for keeping warm that is activated when the temperature in the hive drops...
...Then they are transferred to light duty or put on sick leave. In practice, different commanders make different decisions. An Army colonel, just back from Korea, said pregnant soldiers "were making the forced marches with all their equipment." Yet some officers try to get such women out of the way early. Says Rear Admiral James R. Hogg, of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations: "The bottom line is, we'll get her transferred before she becomes a burden to her shipmates...
...idea of going for broke: Perhaps we should combine an attack on the Cambodian sanctuaries with resumption of the bombing of North Viet Nam as well as mining Haiphong? The opposition would be equally hysterical either way. I replied that we had enough on our plate; we would not be able to sustain such a gamble...