Word: 1920s
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...widespread disregard of income tax laws in the 1970s [Aug. 20] is reminiscent of the widespread disregard of Prohibition laws in the 1920s. In each case ordinary citizens rebelled against unreasonable laws. The "connivers and chiselers" are not the citizens who are striving for economic survival, but the politicians whose inflationary policies and unfair tax laws have eroded the real income of working people...
Despite his age and a painful back ailment from a shipboard accident in the 1920s, Ludwig is amazingly energetic and keeps close watch on Jari. He receives a constant flow of reports at his headquarters. More important, several times a year he flies to Belem on Brazil's northern coast, traveling economy class except when he can hitch a free ride on a friend's corporate jet. At Belem he waits for the Fairchild turboprop that makes the 90-min. flight daily between the port city and Jari. Disdaining VIP treatment, Ludwig crowds on board with newly recruited...
This plot is loose and baggy enough to give Vonnegut plenty of leg room, and he strolls about at will. He offers a lengthy account, for instance, of the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and of their subsequent executions in the 1920s. Not all of the digressions are somber. Starbuck meets Nixon and finds the President's smile "like a rosebud that had just been smashed by a hammer." The hero's meditations on money are childlike enough to produce odd insights. On his first morning of freedom, Starbuck leaves his seedy hotel to buy a newspaper...
...intervention with nature. One of the many barrier islands off the U.S.'s Atlantic and Gulf coasts, Miami Beach is vulnerable to waves, winds and the natural ebb and flow of its fragile sands. During the first great Florida land boom in the early 1920s and the second boom of the 1950s, the beach's problems were compounded by unrestrained growth. Developers put up mansions, hotels and condominiums almost at the water's edge, atop the dunes that protect the island from the lash of the sea. After a devastating hurricane in 1926, many property owners erected...
...Mayakovsky, the bard of the Bolshevik Revolution, was no less attentive to his mistress Lili Brik, though his poems were scarcely as complimentary as Aragon's. Lili was Elsa's older sister, and the series of stunning lyrics that Mayakovsky dedicated to her in the 1910s and 1920s agonized over her indifference and infidelity. The Russian poet, who conducted his life as hyperbolically as he composed his verse, complained in "The Backbone Flute" that Lili's lips were "a monastery hacked out of frigid stone" and her eyes "the gaping hollows of two graves." Condemned...