Word: westing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Take Ahmed. Ahmed was THE fishman at Supersol, the largest grocery store in West Jerusalem, where I did my shopping almost daily this summer. Despite the fact that Ahmed, an Arab-Israeli resident of the Old City of Jerusalem has never seen the ocean, he loves fish. Every day after we said our hellos, regardless of whether I was even purchasing dairy products, Ahmed insisted on describing the catch of the day, in detail, and the exact way to cook salmon or tuna to perfection...
...course of his slim book--For Common Things runs to 207 pages--Purdy spends altogether too much time on what he openly admits are his pet issues: the miasma of confusion that is eastern European public life after 1989, and the ecological disaster of strip-mining in West Virginia. And Purdy admits, too, that his notions of the direction in which public life should move are highly derivative--although his chapter on the pervasive effects of irony and its corrosion of popular culture is original, very sophisticated, and compelling. But if you can cut through the occasional tediousness, what...
...lapses in tone, is an heir to the aphoristic tradition of the environmentalists, and to their conviction that sincere beliefs must root themselves in the solid realities of the physical environment. In Purdy's case, this conviction manifests itself in the attention this text pays to Purdy's native West Virginia...
...Hodge the resentfulness born of this attitude, as Hodge castigates Purdy more for who he is than for what he believes: "Apparently because we're all too ironic or falsely spiritual to believe in anything as simple and real as the value of living on a hillside farm in West Virginia, we lack a politics that functions as a repository of our hopes and dreams." Even to a reader less self-consciously worldly and less corrosively bitter than Hodge, Purdy's tone and substance--the fact that this book is about Jedediah Purdy, and that any power in the book...
...Third Reich. Its bold exploration of issues postwar Germany was doing its best to forget made its author a legendary social critic and literary provocateur. He became strongly identified with Germany?s political left, and in 1990 was criticized for rejecting the speedy reunification of East and West Germany. "In his later writing, he took partisan political positions," says Gray. "But in ?The Tin Drum? he sides broadly with humanity against Nazism. It?s one of the great books of the ?50s and ?60s in any language." One group that won?t be impressed by the Nobel Committee?s choice...