Word: airlessness
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...horrors of Kunta's ocean crossing are based on familiar scholarship But while returning from Africa on a modern freighter, Haley also forced himself to sleep half naked on a rough plank in the ship's airless hold. It was his way of trying to dissolve time and the cultural insulation that can prevent a writer from telling his story. What a story it turns out to be. The 17-year-old Kunta Kinte is sold to a Spotsylvania County, Va., planter for $850 and renamed Toby. But Kunta does not tame easily. Following his fourth escape attempt...
...impoverished Lebanese from areas of South Lebanon devastated by Israeli attacks. The flow of refugees eventually swelled to a crushing total of 30,000. At Tel Zaatar they provided a cheap labor force for the Christian-owned factories in the area. For most, it was a sweatshop existence in airless rooms where they rolled tobacco or cut cloth or finished dresses...
...daring, gifts and vision. In Company and Follies, they gave the U.S. musical theater new horizons. The corollary of valorous risks is the occasional mishap. Pacific Overtures might be called Prince and Sondheim's moonwalk musical. They land, but the dramatic terrain proves to be as arid and airless as the moon...
...countries for the United Nations World Population Conference. It was the largest intergovernmental meeting in history, convoked to devise ways of remedying the soaring overpopulation that is straining declining world food reserves. Yet in spite of the gravity of the issue, the sweltering delegates in Bucharest's airless, ovenlike Palace of the Republic seemed motivated more by national pride and ideology than concern for the hunger that already blights many poor nations...
...full of a quite un-Renaissance sense of foreboding and psychological tension. In the end, he committed suicide in a fit of depression. But Rosso's designs for the Galerie François Premier at Fontainebleau set the court style: the fantastic stucco cartouches, gilding and strapwork; the airless painted space, filled with large twisting bodies based on Michelangelo's figura serpentinata; the strained and tangled poses; the weird color, by turns opulent and acidly dry; the Biblical and classical allegories, recondite to the point of eccentricity. "A courtly art," observed Art Historian André Chastel, "always tends...