critics-from-the-united-states

"“We didn’t know it was only the first then. It was a girl down on . She was a nice enough kid for the life she lived, I guess. Danced in a bump-and-grind house down there. We found her in an alley. Strangled.: He picked up his glass, emptied it. “No clues. Nothing. …”"

"This was Fiesta. Overhead were strings of colored lights. In the center of the square was a small green park, trees and benches and a draped in red-and-orange . A low cement wall ran around the park with entrances at each corner. Entrances hung with grotesque standards. In the street that circled the park, were thatched booths, smelling of food, the acrid smell of ; stacked with cases of , decorated with s, cheap canes topped with celluloid dolls wiggling feathers, and cheap sticks with flimsy yellow birds floating from them, balloons on brittle wooden sticks.This was Fiesta: a run-down carnival."

"Reading Dorothy B. Hughes’s novel ' for the first time is like finding the long-lost final piece to an enormous . Within its s, its -scented shadows, you feel as though you’ve discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing page-turner with sneakily subversive undercurrents. While only intermittently in print for much of the last half century, its influence on crime fiction is unsung yet inescapable. From Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson to Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Harris, nearly every “” tale of the last seventy years bears its imprint—both in terms of its sleek, relentless style and its claustrophobic “mind of the criminal” perspective. But its larger influence derives from Hughes’s uncanny grasp of the connection between violence and misogyny and an embattled masculinity. And its importance extends beyond form or genre and into cultural mythos: the birth of ."

"But such indifference to doctrine accompanies a lassitude toward all progress. The commonfolk still tolerate appalling injustices, because to them social evils are merely steps on the pathway to moksha. How can you help people who think the wretchedness of their poor is divinely appointed?"

"You may regard this as an outrage of the spirit, but it is that or die, and I decline to offer you the choice."

"There's little question, in my mind, that development in the West is digging its own grave. Societies, even technologically sophisticated ones, cannot grow and build against basic conditions of and forever. Sooner or later the character of the land will catch up with them. , forced usually by climate change as well as factional disputes and design miscalculations, make that clear."

"“Altruism can be surprisingly gratifying,” it remarked. “No wonder humans dabble with it.”"

"“People were killed,” Galvanix said wonderingly. “That doesn’t bother anyone,” said Rajee bluntly. “Among twelve billion, international relations are too important to be threatened by skirmishes.”"

"Yasuhiro had studied and thought long about combat, which he knew always deteriorated into chaos whatever the battle plan."

"Like other emerging towns and cities in the and in the developing world, 's vulnerability to mainstream cultural backwash and population flooding puts it on the list of endangered places. And because it is geographically set in the middle of a true natural wilderness—riverine, high desert plateau of central New Mexico—Albuquerque is particularly defenseless against the fast-paced flow of the mainstream world. The attraction of its emptiness seems as irresistible as gravity. Its image is not only that of an impoverished, charm-ridden hick town eager for tourist jobs and glitz, but its "wilderness" status makes it seem ripe for the picking, like certain portions of the or what used to be the deserted beaches of the ."

"Tony Davis, an environmental writer for nearly thirty years, first broke the story that put an end to the myth of 's inexhaustible aquifer. data showed that it was not the size of Lake Superior, but far smaller and more complex than suspected. His handling of the USGS report in the ' gave credibility to the need to create a water conservation program in the city. Davis now writes for the ' in Tucson."

"You older types are mired in the minds you grew up with, a real handicap in a rapidly changing universe. The future is a game for the young and the hungry—I’m five months old myself, and on the cutting edge."

"The universe comprised strife between forces, and there was no use seeking a benign still center to mirror the unfolding peace of a mother’s love."

"“You are enjoying the present disruptions a good deal less than I. That is because I recently restructured my cerebral architecture—that skill is my raison d’être, I should explain—and have adopted an egocentric consciousness, which certainly changes one’s view of the world!” The creature laughed, a shocking sound. “I’m presently as selfish as any human; probably worse, since I am not used to this heady wine. As any infant.”"

"Data security was a proprietary concern, the obsession of those who saw knowledge as commodity, or who had something to hide."

"Humans are deceitful, enthralled to the sexual strategies that drove their animal ancestors and drive them just as blindly. They jostle and kick for social supremacy and mating opportunities, fitfully aware of how this appears yet unable to transcend it. They injure their societies in the interest of those few with whom they share genes, and will injure them in pursuit of opportunities to breed further. They are suspicious, irrational, and destructive, eventually to all but most immediately to those unlike themselves."

"America the beautiful, Let me sing of thee; Burger King and Dairy Queen From sea to shining sea."

"There is a fragility inherent in the symbolism of every great street in New York: stands for a theater that is perpetually in crisis, for financial empires that seem ever ready to decamp to New Jersey, and , perhaps the most celebrated of them all, for a luxury and a style that once seemed unique to New York, but now feels more and more like what can be found in every medium-sized city and shopping mall from here to ."

"Three years are gone, and the has faded from New York. Sorrow and rage have ebbed. The void of ground zero is another construction site. Its fate is now part of a story of process. In this fine book, Paul Goldberger weaves a vivid tale of that process, its hopeful visions, its small triumphs, its ultimate stalemate. His credentials are obvious: more than 30 years as architecture critic of ' and '; author of respected books on city buildings. He saw the go up; 30 years later he gazed at its rubble."

"Books about technical subjects for nontechnicians tend to be obtuse, condescending, or both. The Tower and the Bridge is neither. It is a clear, concise introduction to a difficult subject, and it is written with respect and even passion — something one rarely finds in a book with the word engineering in its title. David P. Billington is clearly moved by great structures — he means it when he says that major works of structural engineering are like the art of poetry, while architecture is the art of prose. ... Mr. Billington creates a set of standards for judging the great structures of the 19th and 20th centuries, and he applies them fairly and consistently. He admires most those works that bring beauty out of relatively spare physical form — the , 's skyscrapers — and he has a good enough eye to distinguish between what is simple and elegant and what is simple and plain."

"... , writing in ancient Rome around 30 , set out the three elements of architecture as "commodity, firmness, and delight," and no one has done better than his tripartite definition, for it cogently sums up the architectural paradox: a building must be useful while at the same time it must be the opposite of useful, since art—delight, in Vitruvian parlance—by its very essence has no mundane function. And then, on top of all that, a building must be constructed according to the laws of engineering, which is is to say that it must be built to stand up. ... The builders of the , the s, s, and were all engineers as much as architects; to them these disciples were one. So, too, with and his , or at . In our time, the disciplines have diverged, and engineers are not architects. But every great structure of modern times, from 's to 's , is a product of engineers as much as of architects; without firmness, there will be no delight. All three elements of architecture are essential."

"There is one architectural firm in New York City that has been notably successful in obtaining commissions in the , so much so that the blocks behind and just north and south of the seem at first glance to consist entirely of structures of its design. The firm is , and unlike most of the other politically well-connected architects who operate in New York, the standard of design has been relatively decent. The firm's impact here has been enormous. Most notable is the , completed in 1973 ..."

"I once heard a prominent museum director call the of architecture. Her fame as an architect owes much to her image as a flamboyant diva who produces striking, over-the-top buildings—a wild woman who makes wild things. Perhaps this is why, despite being the first woman to win the , she has had so little success in the United Kingdom, where her practice was founded, in 1980, and has been based ever since. When the British build modern things, they tend to like them cool and buttoned-up, and Hadid’s buildings are almost explosive in their energy. They look as if they could fly you to the moon."

"The extraordinary shape had conceived for , inspired the architect , who toured the museum a few months before its completion, to proclaim it "the greatest building of our time." It stood as evidence of Gehry's ability to envision form that had not existed before: exhilarating, robust, and baroque in its richness and complexity. The museum could not be called anything but modern, but it was not your father's modernism. Its unusual form bore no resemblance to the stark glass boxes that most people identified with modern architecture."

"Even before the close of the 1940s, a reaction against the bop ethos could be heard on both the East Coast and West Coast. In time, this movement got a name -- "cool jazz.""

"Many jazz fans simply refer to [hard bop] as the Blue Note sound in deference to the recprd label most closely associated with the glory days of hard bop in the 1950s and 1960s."

"Buoyed by the success of the gay and lesbian liberation movement, freed from enforced isolation by changes in the medical and psychiatric establishment, and brought together by the Internet, the transgender community has emerged in the last five years as a new voice in social activism. This voice suggests that, although gender is an identity we are born with, an identity that no amount of social influence can sway, it is too great and varied a force to shoehorn into those ubiquitous boxes marked F and M. While human desires--for love, passion, work, respect, friends, family--remain constant, the way those desires are felt and expressed cannot always be categorized at the moment of birth. Anatomy, as feminists have long argued, is not destiny."

"These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen."

"Over time, my crush on Balder the Beautiful was converted into a crush on Ross, Franklin, Nares, Shackleton, Oates, and Scott. I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure."

"I hasten to mention that I have never actually solicited a catalogue. Although it is tempting to conclude that our mailbox hatches them by spontaneous generation, I know they are really the offspring of promiscuous mailing lists, which copulate in secret and for money. One of the pleasures, or horrors, of the direct-mail business is that you never know to whom your name will be pandered. My friend Ross Baughman, a photographer who once accompanied a group of American mercenaries to Nicaragua, inquired before the trip about a mail-order night-vision scope that would allow him to take pictures during midnight commando raids without using a flash. Ever since, he has been deluge with catalogs for pamphlets on how to make rifle silencers out of old car mufflers and napalm out of laundry detergent."

"The God of revealed religions—and by this I mean religions like yours, Taker religions—is a profoundly inarticulate God. No matter how many times he tries, he can’t make himself clearly or completely understood. He speaks for centuries to the Jews but fails to make himself understood. At last he sends his only-begotten son, and his son can’t seem to do any better. Jesus might have sat himself down with a scribe and dictated the answers to every conceivable theological question in absolutely unequivocal terms, but he chose not to, leaving subsequent generations to settle what Jesus had in mind with pogroms, purges, persecutions, wars, the burning stake, and the rack. Having failed through Jesus, God next tried to make himself understood through Muhammad, with limited success, as always. After a thousand years of silence he tried again with Joseph Smith, with no better results. Averaging it out, all God has been able to tell us for sure is that we should do unto others as we’d have them do unto us. What’s that—a dozen words? Not much to show for five thousand years of work, and we probably could have figured out that much for ourselves anyway. To be honest, I’d be embarrassed to be associated with a god as incompetent as that."

"The fundamental Taker delusion is that humanity itself was designed—and therefore destined—to become us. This is a twin of the idea that the entire universe was created in order to produce this planet. We would smile patronizingly if the Gebusi boasted that humanity was divinely destined to become Gebusi, but we are perfectly satisfied humanity was divinely destined to become us."

"What appears to be kind and is meant to be kind can be the reverse of kind."

"“Now, the way the Zeugen imagined it, the gods have a special knowledge that enables them to rule the world. The knowledge includes the knowledge of who should live and who should die, but it embraces much more than that.This is the general knowledge the gods employ in every choice they make. What the Zeugen perceived is this, that every choice the gods make is good for one creature but evil for another, and if you think about it, it really can’t be otherwise. If the quail goes out to hunt and the gods send it a grasshopper, then this is good for the quail but evil for the grasshopper. And if the fox goes out to hunt, and the gods send it a quail, then this is good for the fox but evil for the quail. And vice versa, of course.If the fox goes out to hunt, and the gods withhold the quail, then this is good for the quail but evil for the fox. Do you see what I mean?” “Of course.”"

"“I guess this is what you mean when you say that if the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds. People with unchanged minds will say, ‘Let’s minimize the effects of pushing the button.’ People with changed minds will say, ‘Let’s throw the box away!’”"

"But when we look back beyond our agricultural revolution into the human past, we no longer understand what people had in mind. We don’t understand what they had in mind as they lived through tens of thousands of years without trade and commerce, without empires or kingdoms or even villages, without accomplishments of any kind."

"The religions I just mentioned—the revealed religions—are fundamentally wed to our cultural vision, and I use the word wed advisedly. These religions are like a harem of sanctimonious wives married to a greedy, loutish sensualist of a husband."

"“It doesn’t matter that everyone ‘knows’ the human race is three million years older than the cities of Mesopotamia. Every molecule of thought in our culture bears the impress of the idea that we needn’t look beyond the Mesopotamian horizon in order to understand our history.”"

"I closed my eyes and found the interior rooms of my head quite thoroughly deserted."

"Modern humans have been around for two hundred thousand years, but according to to our beliefs, God had not a word to say to any of them until we came along."

"I asked, “Is it so easy to change a cultural vision.” “The relevant measures are not ease and difficulty. The relevant measures are readiness and unreadiness. If the time isn’t right for a new idea, no power on earth can make it catch on, but if the time is right, it will sweep the world like wildfire."

"Anyone who thinks the Church is open to new ideas is living in a dreamworld."

"“Always has been my guiding principle for forty years to say ‘Never trust a Christian.’ Not once has ever Christian given me reason to change.”"

"Any culture will become an obscenity when blown up into a universal world culture to which all must belong."

"“To you, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism look very different, but to me they look the same. Many of you would say that something like Buddhism doesn’t even belong in this list, since it doesn’t link salvation to divine worship, but to me this is just a quibble. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism all perceive human beings as flawed, wounded creatures in need of salvation, and all rely fundamentally on revelations that spell out how salvation is to be attained, either by departing from this life or by rising above it.” “True.” “The adherents of these religions are mightily struck and obsessed by their differences—to the point of mayhem, murder, jihad, and genocide—but to me, as I say, you all look alike."

"Q. Wasn’t agriculture developed as a response to famine? A. Agriculture is useless as a response to famine. You can no more respond to famine by planting a crop than you can respond to falling out of an airplane by knitting a parachute. But this really misses the point. To say that agriculture was developed as a response to famine is like saying that cigarette smoking was developed as a response to lung cancer. Agriculture doesn’t cure famine, it promotes famine—it creates the conditions in which famines occur. Agriculture makes it possible for more people to live in an area than that area can support—and that’s exactly where famines occur."

"It should be noted that what is crucial to our survival as a race is not the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself."

"Atterley’s message seemed difficult to summarize and was typically characterized as “mind-boggling” by those who were favorably impressed and as “incomprehensible” by those who weren’t."

"Programs are initiated in order to counter or defeat vision."

"What was forgotten in the Great Forgetting was the fact that, before the advent of agriculture and village life, humans had lived in a profoundly different way.…Paleontology made untenable the idea that humanity, agriculture, and civilization all began at roughly the same time."