Word: spare
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...them in depth, support for space fell faster than Skylab. Nixon, whose obnoxiousness had interrupted the moonwalk, turned around and canned the last three Apollos. The funds for the proposed space station were cut sharply, meaning that Skylab would be built on the cheap, out of a mishmash of spare parts from the Apollo programs. NASA wanted to put the station into a higher orbit than the one ended in Australia last week, but the money wasn't there...
Novelist Flanagan, 56, is a longtime English professor (University of California, State University of New York) who has spent much of his spare time over the past two decades in Ireland. He is an unabashed Mayo chauvinist, and his lyric affection for the land and the people animates his characters. Even the Rev. Mr. Broome drops his scholarly tone to write how Irish music "would come to us with the sadness of a lost world, each note a messenger sent wandering among the Waterford goblets." Yet the author is too honest a historian to let sympathy alter circumstances. The first...
Vacations may be pointless. The Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia once found themselves with an embarrassment of leisure. Their yams came up so abundantly that they had no need to work for their food. To occupy their excesses of spare time, the islanders devised the Kula, a ceremonial maritime exchange of economically worthless objects- red shell necklaces and white shell bracelets. The Kula, in formal circuit around the islands, was the vacation and vocation of the people. They became their own quaintness, their own tourist trap. It is possible, in the end, that they even took American Express...
...unjuridical To Set the Record Straight surges onto the bestseller lists. Now comes John Ehrlichman's second novel, The Whole Truth, a racy Washington scandal spin-off aimed at reeling in a movie or TV contract, as did his first, The Company. More modestly, Leon Jaworski offers a spare memoir, Confession and Avoidance, his second Watergate book, which seems pitched in too low a key to unlock any box-office riches...
...what she makes of them is remarkable. A lecturer at Pace University and a poet, she compresses a lifetime of births and deaths and suffering and love into just 181 pages. Her prose deftly captures the cadences of ghetto speech (by turns garrulous, captious, earth-smart), and her spare imagery avoids all sentimentality. Instead, as its biblical title suggests, Let the Lion Eat Straw is a graceful hymn of love...