Word: wasteland
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Basketball has long been a wasteland at Harvard, but those days seem emphatically over. Crippled by the worst facility this side of Moskva--the ancient and decrepit Indoor Athletic Building--the hoopsters could not convince any serious ballplayers to spend four years here. But the team has a new arena under construction. Briggs Cage, a few good recruiting years under its belt, and a first-ever Ivy championship within reach. Look for coach Frank McLaughlin (the Bronx's Ambassador to Harvard) and his squad to give traditional powers Penn and Princeton a run for the laurels this year...
...senses, too, that after 11 years, Arlen would really rather be writing about something else; but as his criticism digresses, the results are intriguing in themselves. The author of such nonfiction books as the National Award-winning Passage to Ararat and Exiles seems to deserve better than the media wasteland, and as he makes his forays into such subjects as Hawthorne and the Puritans, America's new manners or our shifting perceptions of the Vietnam War, he is exhilarating. It is sometimes unfortunate that he cannot simply follow such leads from the start...
...closest approach to the contemporary is a bittersweet sense of loss and of being lost that deepens the emotions of most of the characters, but it remains whispy and gently, one of the beauties of life. Helprin is no one to probe the horrors and malaise of the Wasteland. The characters all avoid direct confrontation with the vaguely acknowledged dislocations of modern life, and thereby don't get desperate or weird or done in. They just get wistful and dreamy. And this dreariness, this systematic response to life is embraced by all the characters in "Ellis Island" and Other Stories...
Minow was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1961 to 1963 and responsible for the description of TV as a "vast wasteland...
...wasteland of TV comes Carl and his Cosmos [Oct. 20]. I watch, spellbound. If it takes a dash of razzle-dazzle to make us turn starward, to spark feelings of awe, enthusiasm and even love as we consider the universe, then more power to Showmaster Sagan...