Word: apologia
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...account of the tribulations of the Department of History at Harvard University which appeared in The Harvard Crimson and The Boston Globe seems to involve an assumption which may be worth some re-thinking. Be assured that I write this apologia for the elders among the Americanists in the Department out of no abiding affection for Harvard. Five years there as a graduate student in history in the 1930s left me with a deep distaste for that university as an institution, a distaste not wholly inconvenient since it enables me without scruple to toss the meeching appeals for further funding...
...spent a lifetime treating the ailments of cows, horses, sheep and pigs, yet here I am, in my twilight years, bringing out a volume of my dog stories." So begins James Herriot's wholly unnecessary apologia. The Yorkshire vet's style is unadorned, his message is affectionate, and his four- footed characters are irresistible. Here he has gathered 50 recollections of canines, some of them sentimental, a few tragic and at least one--the story of a terrier male who abruptly becomes attractive to other males--as odd as anything in the Decameron. Herriot recalls that in his student days...
Margaret's written apologia to her son forms one vivid strand of this intricately interwoven novel. She and Pinkham had flourished during the 1960s. It was a time of adolescent hope, particularly for people entering their 30s and 40s. She writes, "Your father, think of it, Bayard, was rebuilding slums. There was to be warmth and light, Shakespeare and the beat of African drums . . . Your mother wrapped in a slave's headcloth above a bastard dashiki. French champagne with grits. See the good of it before you laugh...
...earned in the late '60s with her groundbreaking book, the mellowed-out tone of her largely-improvised talk carried a sense of uninformed complacency, emphasized by an outdated rhetoric of "sex slaves," "deflated ego," and "male chauvinism." Her message of "make love not war" sounded at times like an apologia for the '70s image of aggressive feminism...
...companies operating in South Africa is twice abstracted from reality, now so irrelevant to South African conditions as to be utterly absurd. If Harvard continues to argue that the University's current policy can make a difference in South Africa, its words will sound more and more like an apologia for the status quo than a realistic program for change...