Word: well-to-do
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...voter apathy, widespread self-centredness, and alienation from a distant and bureaucratic federal government. In this atmosphere, a few voluntary exercises in civic virtue would do little to change general attitudes. The time and opportunity costs that such voluntary activities often involve can be handled primarily by the well-to-do. What we should aim for is a common civic effort involving all classes, not continued reinforcement of class divisions...
White would have achieved eminence in any case, but the path he took ambled through a series of happy circumstances. The sixth child of a well-to-do piano manufacturer, he grew up in Mount Vernon, a tree-lined suburb of New York City. He went to Cornell, where he gladly surrendered his given names, Elwyn Brooks, for the moniker Andy (after Andrew D. White, the university's first president). After graduation, White held jobs in journalism and advertising without finding an employer who could make good use of his whimsical temperament and lapidary prose...
...past six years," he says, "there have been four or five lung- cancer deaths in Casmalia. The young woman who used to teach here with me was ! in perfect health when she came, and she died of leukemia two years later." Not until last month, after well-to-do neighborhoods in Santa Maria got a strong chemical whiff one day, did the county government finally admit the dump was a problem. People in Casmalia are sure they have the official reluctance figured: revenues from the dump this year will be $40 million, with the county taking...
...member of a well-to-do Kentucky family, Thornton went to Sewanee Military Academy, then joined the Army and trained as a paratrooper. Back home in Lexington, he became a narcotics officer, then went on to earn a law degree from the University of Kentucky and worked as an attorney. But he soon strayed to the other side of the law. He had been implicated in marijuana smuggling, and he was on probation from a drug-possession conviction...
Calvino's spare narrative seems to cry out for allegorical explanations. Mr. Palomar could represent the travail of Western empiricism, in which every new discovery adds to the inexplicable. Or he might represent the last gasp of a class (European, intellectual, well-to-do) that is being smothered by the rise of the masses. None of the possible interpretations seems as interesting as the novel's deceptively plain but beguiling language. The wise reader of Mr. Palomar might best adopt a strategy that the hero formulates but fails to follow: "Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself...