Word: yarn
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...DEATH OF METHUSELAH AND OTHER STORIES by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $17.95). At 83, the Yiddish yarn spinner shows undiminished power to capture the peculiar din of human commerce...
...impact of man-made substances on weather shifts is much harder to detect. "You can't see it, touch it or smell it," says Hoyle. "That is precisely what makes the scientific discovery process so important." And precisely what makes this week's cover story such a good detective yarn...
...After all, the kids will be watching. He may also find that his fondness for vignettes ("Remember when Aunt Bea got squiffed and vamped the delivery boy?") undercuts the dramatic imperative to hold the anonymous viewer's attention. Private lives don't always play in public. Grandpa's % ripping yarn is a stranger's restless yawn...
Falk's lilting voice enchants the audience as well as the young invalid. But the boy breaks the spell of the yarn with his constant protestations at every realistic turn of the plot. Grandpa, therefore, has to improvise and make the fairy tale more acceptably fanciful...
...Dirk Gently, the holistic detective ("We solve the whole crime; we find the whole person"), is diverted from a career of finding vanished cats by a daunting assignment: assist a former Cambridge classmate who is wanted for murder and -- oh, yes -- save the human race from impending extinction. The yarn embraces time travel, ghostly possession, quantum mechanics, musical theory, computer modeling, cellular communications and, from another galaxy, Electric Monks (they "believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe"). College-level physics...