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Joy William"s quirky fourth novel The Quick and the Dead follows three 16-year-old misfits in an abnormal Charlie"s Angels set in the American south-west. Driven unclearly to defend animal rights, the girls accomplish little beyond curse: they rescue a wounded ox and hurl stones at stuffed elephants. In what is structurally a road novel that ends up where it began, the threesome stumbles upon both cruelty to animals and unlikely romance. A mournful dog is killed by an angry neighbor, a taxidermist falls in love with an 8-year-old direct-action firebrand determined that he pays for his sins. A careen across the barely tamed Arizona prairie, this peculiar book aims less for a traditional storyline than a sequence of noisy (often hilarious) conversations, ridiculous circumstances, and absurdist scene. The consequent long-walk-to-nowhere is both the book"s limitation and its charm. All three girls are motherless. Fiercely political Alice discovers that her parents are her grandparents, who thereupon shrivel: "Lie had kept them young whereas the truth had accelerated them practically into oldness". Both parents of the sorrowful Corvus drowned while driving on a flooded interstate off-ramp. The mother of the more conventional Annabel ("one of those people who would say, we"ll get in touch soonest" when they never wanted to see you again") slammed her car drunkenly into a fish restaurant. Later, Annabel"s father observes to his wife"s ghost. "You didn"t want to order what I ordered, darling". The sharp-tongued ghost snaps back: "That"s because you always ordered badly and wanted me to experience your miserable mistake". Against a roundly apocalyptic world view, the great pleasures of this book are line-by-line. Ms. Williams can break setting and character alike in a few slashes: "it was one of those rugged American places, a remote, sad-ass, but courageous downwind town whose citizens were flawed and brave". Alice"s acerbity spits little wisdoms: putting lost teeth under a pillow for money is "a classic capitalistic consumer trick, designed to wean you away at an early age from healthy horror" and sensible dismay to greedy, deluded, sunny expectancy". Whether or not the novel, like Alice, expressly advocates animal rights, an animal motif crops up in every scene, as flesh-and-blood "critters" (usually dead) or plain decoration on crockery. If Ms. Williams does not intend to induce human horror at a pending cruel Armageddon, she at least invokes a future of earthly loneliness, where animals appear only as ceramic-hen butter dishes and extinct-species Elastoplasts. One caution: when flimsy narrative superstructure begins to sag, anarchic wackiness can grow wearing. While The Quick and the Dead is sharp from its first page, the trouble with starting at the edge is there is nowhere to go. Nevertheless, Ms. Williams is original, energetic and viscously funny: Carl Hiaasen with a conscience. This novel is attentive to each of the following EXCEPT______.
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"Making money is a dirty game", says the Institute of Economic Affairs, summing up the attitude of British novelists towards business. The IEA, a free market think-tank, has just published a collection of essays (The Representation of Business in English Literature) by five academics chronicling the hostility of the country"s men and women of letters to the sordid business of making money. The implication is that Britain"s economic performance is retarded by an anti-industrial culture. Rather than blaming rebellious workers and incompetent managers for Britain"s economic worries. Then, we can put George Orwell and Martin Amis in the dock instead. From Dickens"s Scrooge to Amis"s John Self in his 1980s novel Money, novelists have conjured up a rogue"s gallery of mean, greedy, amoral money-men that has alienated their impressionable readers from the noble pursuit of capitalism. The argument has been well made before, most famously in 1981 by Martin Wiener. an American academic, in his English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. Lady Thatcher was an admirer of Mr. Wiener"s, and she led a crusade to revive the "entrepreneurial culture" which the liberal elite had allegedly trampled underfoot. The present Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, sounds as though he agrees with her. At a recent speech to the Confederation of British Industry, he declared that it should be the duty of every teacher in the country to "communicate the virtues of business and enterprise". Certainly, most novelists are hostile to capitalism, but this refrain risks scapegoating writers for failings for which they are not to blame. Britain"s culture is no more anti-business than that of other countries. The Romantic Movement. which started as a reaction against the industrial revolution of the 21st century, was born and flourished in Germany, but has not stopped the Germans from being Europe"s most successful entrepreneurs and industrialists. Even the Americans are guilty of blackening business"s name. SMERSH and SPECTRE went our with the cold war, James Bond now takes on international media magnates rather than Rosa Kleb. His films such as Erin Brockovich have pitched downtrodden, moral heroes against the evil of faceless corporatism. Yet none of this seems to have dented America"s lust for free enterprise. The irony is that the novel flourished as an art form only after, and as a result of the creation of the new commercial classes of Victorian England, just as the modern Hollywood film can exist only in an era of mass consumerism. Perhaps the moral is that capitalist societies consume literature and film to let off steam rather than to change the world. George Orwell and Martin Amis should be responsible for the retarded economy because ______.
Drug use is rising dramatically among the nation"s youth after a decade of decline. From 1993 to 1994, marijuana use among young people (1)_____ from 12 to 17 jumped 50 percent. One in five high school seniors (2)_____ marijuana daily. Monitoring the Future, which (3)_____ student drug use annually, reports that negative attitudes about drugs have declined for the fourth year in a row. (4)_____ young people see great risk in using drugs. Mood-altering pharmaceutical drugs are (5)_____ new popularity among young people. Ritalin, (6)_____ as a diet pill in the 1970s and now used to (7)_____ hyperactive children, has become a (8)_____ drug on college campuses. A central nervous system (9)_____, Ritalin can cause strokes, hypertension, and seizures. Rohypnol, produced in Europe as a (10)_____ tranquilizer, lowers inhibitions and suppresses short-term memory, which has led to some women being raped by men they are going out with. (11)_____ taken with alcohol, its effects are greatly (12)_____. Rock singer Kurt Cobain collapsed from an (13)_____ of Rohypnol and champagne a month before he committed (14)_____ in 1994. In Florida and Texas, Rohypnol has become widely abused among teens, who see the drug as a less expensive (15)_____ for marijuana and LSD. Alcohol and tobacco use is increasing among teenagers, (16)_____ younger adolescents. Each year, more than one million teens become regular smokers, (17)_____ they cannot legally purchase tobacco. By 12th grade, one in three students smokes. In 1995, one in five 14-year-olds reported smoking regularly, a 33 percent jump (18)_____ 1991. Drinking among 14-year-olds climbed 50 percent from 1992 to 1994, and all teens reported substantial increases in (19)_____ drinking. In 1995, one in five 10th graders reported having been drunk in the past 30 days. Two-thirds of high school seniors say they know a (20)_____ with a drinking problem.
Drug use is rising dramatically among the nation"s youth after a decade of decline. From 1993 to 1994, marijuana use among young people (1)_____ from 12 to 17 jumped 50 percent. One in five high school seniors (2)_____ marijuana daily. Monitoring the Future, which (3)_____ student drug use annually, reports that negative attitudes about drugs have declined for the fourth year in a row. (4)_____ young people see great risk in using drugs. Mood-altering pharmaceutical drugs are (5)_____ new popularity among young people. Ritalin, (6)_____ as a diet pill in the 1970s and now used to (7)_____ hyperactive children, has become a (8)_____ drug on college campuses. A central nervous system (9)_____, Ritalin can cause strokes, hypertension, and seizures. Rohypnol, produced in Europe as a (10)_____ tranquilizer, lowers inhibitions and suppresses short-term memory, which has led to some women being raped by men they are going out with. (11)_____ taken with alcohol, its effects are greatly (12)_____. Rock singer Kurt Cobain collapsed from an (13)_____ of Rohypnol and champagne a month before he committed (14)_____ in 1994. In Florida and Texas, Rohypnol has become widely abused among teens, who see the drug as a less expensive (15)_____ for marijuana and LSD. Alcohol and tobacco use is increasing among teenagers, (16)_____ younger adolescents. Each year, more than one million teens become regular smokers, (17)_____ they cannot legally purchase tobacco. By 12th grade, one in three students smokes. In 1995, one in five 14-year-olds reported smoking regularly, a 33 percent jump (18)_____ 1991. Drinking among 14-year-olds climbed 50 percent from 1992 to 1994, and all teens reported substantial increases in (19)_____ drinking. In 1995, one in five 10th graders reported having been drunk in the past 30 days. Two-thirds of high school seniors say they know a (20)_____ with a drinking problem.
Joseph Rykwert entered his field when post-war modernist architecture was coming under fire for its alienating embodiment of outmoded social ideals. Think of the UN building in New York, the city of Brasilia, the UNESCO building in Paris, the blocks of housing "projects" throughout the world. These tall, uniform boxes are set back from the street, isolated by windswept plazas. They look inward to their own functions, presenting no "face" to the inhabitants of the city, no "place" for social interaction. For Mr. Rykwert, who rejects the functionalist spirit of the Athens Charter of 1933, a manifesto for much post-war building, such facelessness destroys the human meaning of the city. Architectural form should not rigidly follow function, but ought to reflect the needs of the social body it represents. Like other forms of representation, architecture is the embodiment of the decisions that go into its making, not the result of impersonal forces, market or history. Therefore, says Mr. Rykwert, adapting Joseph de Maistre"s dictum that a nation has the government it deserves, our cities have the faces they deserve. In this book, Mr. Rykwert. a noted urban historian of anthropological love, offers a flaneur"s approach to the city"s exterior surface rather than an urban history from the conceptual inside out. He does not drive, so his interaction with the city affords him a warts-and-all view with a sensual grasp of what it is to be a "place". His story of urbanization begins, not surprisingly, with the industrial revolution when populations shifted and increased, exacerbating problems of housing and crime. In the 19th century many planning programs and utopias (Ebenezer Howard"s garden city and Charles Fourier"s "phalansteries" among them) were proposed as remedies. These have left their mark on 20th-century cities, as did Baron Hausmann"s boulevards in Paris, Eugene Viollet-le-Duc"s and Owen Jones"s arguments for historical style, and Adolf Loos"s fateful turn-of-the-century call to abolish ornament which, in turn, inspired Le Corbusier"s bare functionalism. The reader will recognize all these ideas in the surfaces of the cities that hosted them: New York, Paris, London, and Vienna. Cities changed again after the Second World War as populations grew, technology raced and prosperity spread. Like it or not, today"s cities are the muddled product, among other things, of speed, greed, outmoded social agendas and ill-suited postmodern aesthetics. Some lament the old city"s death; others welcome its replacement by the electronically driven "global village". Mr. Rykwert has his worries, to be sure, but he does not see ruin or chaos everywhere. He defends the city as a human and social necessity. In Chandigarh, Canberra and New York he sees overall success; in New Delhi, Paris and Shanghai, large areas of falling. For Mr. Rykwert, a man on foot in the age of speeding virtual, good architecture may still show us a face where flaneurs can read the story of their urban setting in familiar metaphors. The author associates the issue of functionism with post-war modernist architecture because
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