Word: polymath
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts by Eberhard Busch (Fortress, 1976). A colleague's intimate biography of the courageous polymath who was this century's leading Protestant theologian...
...explanation for this disastermania: it is merely a harmless byproduct of popular entertainment. Explains Science Writer Isaac Asimov: "Hollywood just happens to be very good at special effects, primarily destructive effects." Indeed, in a forthcoming book, A Choice of Catastrophes, the polymath popularizer seeks to soothe anxieties about global disaster. Says Asimov: "All the scenarios are either very low in probability, or very distant in the future...
DIED. Thomas C. Poulter, 81, polymath who served as the scientific director on Rear Admiral Richard Byrd's second expedition to the Antarctic in 1933, invented seismic methods for the discovery of oil, and recorded the voices of sea mammals over the past 15 years; in Menlo Park, Calif. Poulter led the party that saved Byrd's life when the admiral, living alone near the South Pole, suffered from carbon-monoxide poisoning and began sending incoherent radio messages...
Like his famous younger brother, polymath Polemicist William F. Buckley Jr., Jim always stood far to the right politically. But he did not get into politics until the late '60s, when the New York Conservative Party-a predominantly Catholic faction that had sprouted from right-wing disgust with the liberal leanings of both major parties in the state-began to make waves. In 1968, without having given a formal public speech in 17 years, he took his castle-Irish dignity and shy grin into the Senate campaign. To everyone's surprise, he rolled up 17% of the vote...
Parsons, 59, spent five years devising his system. An eccentric polymath who trained as a research chemist at London University, he is now press officer for the British Library. He worked on his directory at home while watching television. "I continue to be astonished that such a simple test should be adequate to distinguish more than 10,000 classical themes," he says modestly. His publishers are even more surprised at the volume's brisk sales. Before reviews appeared, and despite a stiff hardback price of ?6 (about $14), bookshops began reordering...