Word: worthlessness
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...LAST WORTHLESS EVENING, Andre Dubus -- O-ZONE, Paul Theroux...
Forget the business about novellas and stories in the subtitle. Author Andre Dubus' latest collection of short fiction contains six pieces, four of them somewhat longer than the other two. It is Dubus' main title that calls for scrutiny. The Last Worthless Evening is not taken from any of the works included in the book; it alludes instead to a passage from William Faulkner's The Bear that amounts to a dirge for man's despoliation of the New World. In the past, Dubus has called his collections names such as Finding a Girl in America (1980) and The Times...
Rose, by itself, is worth the price of this book; it is the most powerful entry in Dubus' impressive canon. Some decades down the road, enough justification will have cohered to call Rose a classic American story. And it is not, in truth, the product of a last worthless evening but of an artist in full control of his sympathies and skill...
...problem with AIDS is that on the one hand, public health officials want to be reassuring, saying it's not easy to catch if you don't engage in specific behavior, because if people become hysterical it will lead to worthless and dangerous interventions of civil liberties. On the other hand, it is a very serious problem and needs to be directly confronted," he says...
Every time someone says "Where's it at?" it is as if a counterfeit dollar enters the nation's money supply. Gradually, people lose faith in the currency until it is as worthless as the German mark in the '30s. When it takes a wheelbarrow full of bills to buy a loaf of bread, the monetary system is no longer useful as a standard for trade. When "don't" follows "he" and "doesn't" follows "I," language is no longer a useful standard for communication...