Word: gluttonous
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Getty, a Norton Simon, a Mellon-finds in great art what eluded Alexander of Macedon-a last world to conquer. It is a lust to which overachievers have been notoriously susceptible, from Catherine the Great, who built Leningrad's incomparable Hermitage ("I am not a nibbler but a glutton") to U.S. Industrialist Joseph Hirshhorn, the great benefactor of the Smithsonian ("I have a madman's rage for art"). To be sure, such stupendous collectors and donors still make record purchases. But it is not the proud possessors who crowd the salesrooms and find bonanzas in baubles...
Which brings us to, or leaves us with, Kevin "I-built-Quincy-Market" White. White, a benevolent-looking, white-haired man who will turn 50 the day of the preliminary election, has commanded the troops in City Hall for the past 12 years. Is White a glutton for punishment? The mayor, his aides whisper in your ear, has led the city through the worst of times (i.e. the civil war to desegrate the city's schools) and now wants to guide his city into the 1980's. White is seeking an unprecedented fourth term in office and, if enough people...
Everybody by now is aware that the cost of the American way is enormous, that air conditioning is an energy glutton. It uses some 9% of all electricity produced. Such an extravagance merely to provide comfort is peculiarly American and strikingly at odds with all the recent rhetoric about national sacrifice in a period of menacing energy shortages. Other modern industrial nations such as Japan, Germany and France have managed all along to thrive with mere fractions of the man-made coolness used in the U.S., and precious little of that in private dwellings. Here, so profligate...
James Boswell, whose recurrent gonorrhea gives this book its captivating title was a glutton for debilitating pleasures. The biographer of Samuel Johnson swilled and swived his way through 18th century London and suffered, by Dr Ober's documented count, 19 acute attacks of urethritis. Just how the clap affected his writing is not readily apparent. More comprehensible are the roots of Boswell's reckless social life, specifically his Scots Calvinist origin with its severe strictures against wine and wenching. For Boswell, the embodiment of this authority was his father, the eighth Lord Auchinleck, a straitlaced, unaffectionate parent...
...awesome complexity of producing these early attempts to recombine genetically disparate elements aside, the medieval entertainer forever put the seal on his claim to the ultimate glutton's prize with works of construction that were nothing short of awesome. Moderns who contemplate eating themselves to death should consider that all the revelers at Philip Good's holiday celebration survived. It was 1453, and the renaiscance was still just a twinkle in a Florentine...