Word: swiftness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have been city dwellers for 50 centuries, but barely two centuries have sufficed to bring U.S. cities to a desperate crisis. With seven out of ten Americans now living in cities, the U.S. is the world's largest urban society. The growth of the cities has been so swift that it has spawned some of the nation's deepest and most pressing problems. Throughout the U.S., the big cities are scarred by slums, hobbled by inadequate mass transportation, starved for sufficient finances, torn by racial strife, half-choked by polluted air. The nation's urban population...
Uncovered 18 months ago, Rabinovich escaped arrest by traveling from city to city and staying in furnished rooms until "Soviet justice caught up with him." His punishment, however, was swift; at least two of his eight accomplices went to forced-labor camps, but after a one-hour trial, Rabinovich was sentenced to be shot...
...economic and educational peer of his new neighbors, many whites react with unreasoning fear or hostility to the idea of having a Negro next door. Few things have done more to create this attitude than the high incidence of crime and violence in the black ghettos. Moreover, the swift deterioration of some public housing projects occupied by Negroes leads many whites to believe that the arrival of a Negro family is the certain prelude to garbage in the streets, broken windows, cockroaches and rats-even though these conditions are unheard of in such carefully maintained middle-class Negro areas...
...wadded breasts or tight stays hidden under their clothes." The magistrates were greatly offended by Sinyavsky's suggestion that the government might transform human fetuses into fish to provide food for the people. The judges, lacking a sense of humor or satire, could not see the parallel to Swift...
Anything Can Be True. Barth's parable is something like Dante's, a pilgrimage within an invented cosmology. Here and there his prose matches the cool, deadly manner of Swift in dealing in an offhand way with the totally outrageous. He is as gamy as Swift; there are some campus orgies, and sex is kid's play to Goat-Boy. Like Swift, who satirized the casus belli between Britain and France as a dispute between Bigendians and Littlendians, Barth parodies today's split between the technologically similar but ideologically dissimilar East and West. Yet his prime...