Word: wayes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Brazilian and U.S. experts, using the "miracle rice" imported from the Philippines, are developing the world's largest fields, which already cover some 7,900 acres. A big poultry farm is being set up, and experiments are under way to breed a more robust strain of water buffalo...
Fame has a way of ruining a writer's reputation. Take the case of Kurt Vonnegut, who became a cult figure in the late '60s after enduring years of hard-earned obscurity. A growing army of high school and college readers began proclaiming him a deep thinker, at about the same time that critics started cuffing him for being a shallow artist. Both judgments were wrong. Vonnegut has never written a thought that could not occur to a sporadically meditative teenager, nor has he pretended to; those who are impressed by the profundity of a shrug...
...Starbuck, "you look in my left shoe . . . You will find my will in there. I leave the RAMJAC Corporation to its rightful owners, the American people." Starbuck is dazzled by the purity of her motive but convinced that her act will make not one whit of difference to the way people live: "The economy is a thoughtless weather system - and nothing more. Some joke on the people, to give them such a thing...
...less happily, is the simple moral that runs through almost all of his work. As Starbuck puts it, "We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one." Yet Vonnegut does not believe that people are capable of doing so, at least not in a way that will make them happy. This leads to the static quality of his books: nothing much ever changes except to get a little worse. Some of the evidence Vonnegut offers is rigged: Starbuck comes to believe that wisdom does not exist and hence can not be used to improve...
Perhaps it is part of the famous narcissism of the '70s, but Americans forget how violent and depraved other cultures have been. There is something hilarious, in a grisly way, about George Augustus Selwyn, the late 18th century London society figure and algolagnic whose morbid interest in human suffering sent him scurrying over to Paris whenever a good execution was scheduled. Americans may have displayed an unwholesome interest in the departure of Gary Gilmore two years ago, but that was nothing compared with the macabre fascinations, the public hangings, the Schadenfreud of other centuries. In the 17th century, Londoners...