Word: twain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Wall Street boom. But no one came forward. "It had been only yesterday, in the 1930s, that the big realistic novel, with its broad social sweep, had put American literature on the world stage for the first time," Wolfe writes, apparently forgetting such pre-1930s writers as Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. He adds that while five of the first six American Nobel laureates in literature were what he describes as realistic novelists (Pearl Buck, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck), by the '60s young writers and intellectuals regarded their kind of realism...
Everybody talks about the weather, goes the saying (often wrongly attributed to Mark Twain), but nobody does anything about it. The word from scientists is that whoever said this was wrong. All of us, as we go about the mundane business of existence, are helping change the weather and every other aspect of life on this fair planet: Los Angelenos whipping their sunny basin into a brown blur on the way to work every morning; South Americans burning and cutting their way through the rain forest in search of a better life; a billion Chinese, their smokestacks belching black coal...
Through the centuries, few natural phenomena have inspired as much fear and awe as solar eclipses. The ancient Chinese used firecrackers and gongs to drive away the spirit they thought was devouring the sun. Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, aware that a most timely total eclipse was going to occur, escaped being burned at the stake by King Arthur's knights when he predicted that the sun would disappear. A benign form of sun worship continues to this day, not only among beachgoers but also by a group of intrepid American astronomy buffs who have traveled around the world...
...this she means the peculiar twain of her parentage. Her father had been a Nazi officer, labeled the "Mad Sadist of Bleritz" for his genetic experiments in a concentration camp and executed after being tried at Nuremberg. One of his victims was the half-gypsy girl who became Sandra's mother. She was, the daughter notes ironically, "really lucky, and was all of 15 when I was born, at the very end of the war." Sandra, of course, never knew her father, and the mother who raised her was demonstratively sinking into madness. Given the bizarre facts of her conception...
...Mark Twain once said that the secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow...