Word: wasteland
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fuss about teachers [NATION, July 20]? I've taught high school English for almost 20 years, and I've discovered that good teachers produce students who learn how to teach themselves. Good teachers are passionate about how young people learn. Good teachers are those who quietly ignore the wasteland of school administrations and the quibbles of the unions. They just teach their classes. JOHN E. WHITING Matawan...
...with Clockers, his 1992 novel about the drug trade in a worn-down wasteland of urban New Jersey, Richard Price creates in his new novel, Freedomland (Broadway Books; 546 pages; $25), a thriller in which plot grows inevitably from place, and place seems utterly real. The most powerful impression a reader feels in these two novels is the sense, in a scene set in a chaotic emergency room or in the junk-filled scrubland between a black housing project and a shabby white neighborhood, that yes, this is what such a backwater would look like, sound like, smell like...
...what? The guests come on the show voluntarily. The showcase of fisticuffs and nudity does not exactly stand out in the wasteland of our popular culture. And as for the kids, they'll probably learn more from Jerry's "final thought" than from their Sunday school teacher. (For the uninitiated, Jerry's "final thought" is a surprisingly profound social commentary that concludes every broadcast...
...psychiatrist's consulting room. Rising from this conventionally-British yet potentially-portentous setting, Eliot's language manages a tone of religious pronouncement and philosophical anguish that still sounds natural coming from the play's routine, middle-aged characters. It is just like when you read certain sections of The Wasteland over the phone to your mother, and your roommate notices that your speech is high-brow without noting that you are actually uttering sovereign metaphors for the emptiness of modern life. Thus, is The Cocktail Party's pro-found human philosophy slipped beneath the rug of Eliot's drawing room...
...locals that is a delicate mix of dire warnings and creative alternatives. Unless you take steps now, she says--use natural fertilizers, market the cerrado's evergreen flowers and fruits, or turn county-size chunks of the region into nature parks for tourists--your children will inherit a wasteland. The message seems to be getting through: in and around Alto Paraiso, a fourth of the residents live off enterprises that don't involve trashing the land...