Paper or Plastic?

John Sutherland

  • Gain by Richard Powers
    Heinemann, 355 pp, £15.99, March 2000, ISBN 0 434 00862 1

Every year since 1981 the MacArthur Foundation has made awards to between 20 and 40 Americans (depending on how the stock-market performs) across all the fields of human endeavour – less sport and business, which have their own prizes. The Foundation recognises the familiar élite activities from architecture through poetry and theoretical physics to zoology. But it is also interested in less confined genius. This year’s list includes a teacher ‘who uses unlikely building materials, such as old tyres, scrap wood and bottles, to construct beautiful and ingenious homes in remote regions of Alabama’ and ‘a woman who, working from her wheelchair, is championing the rights and changing the lives of women with disabilities in the poorest regions of the world’.

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Vol. 22 No. 15 · 10 August 2000 » John Sutherland » Paper or Plastic? (print version)
pages 20-21 | 4121 words