Word: alight
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...glass bulb to a set of storage batteries. The piece of carbonized cotton sewing thread inside the bulb suddenly lighted up. In dozens of earlier experiments, the filament had blazed a few minutes before breaking, but this time it continued to glow. Forty hours later the bulb was still alight, and Thomas Alva Edison boasted to his staff: "If it will burn that number of hours now, I know I can make it burn a hundred." Man had entered the age of electricity...
...this third novel (after Last Night at the Brain Thieves' Ball and Preservation Hall) Spencer builds a model of emergent love pursued to its obsessive extreme. The author constructs his tale around an apposite metaphor, catastrophic fire. Seventeen-year-old David Axelrod sets some newspapers alight on the porch of his beloved Jade's house after her parents have forbidden him to see her for 30 days. He wishes to attract attention and instead nearly incinerates Jade, her brothers and parents...
Meantime, in winding ropes of bright capillaries, the slow and overpowered commuting cars poof home. From above, at night, American cities look like garishly jumbled jewelry strewn up and down the landscape; in the centers, empty high-rises of piled diamonds glow, great sparklers kept alight for the cleaning women, for the admiration of passing planes...
...Kennedy," said one of them. But the next day the President had cooled off and had second thoughts. He told congressional leaders that he had overreacted to Kennedy and he regretted having done so. But by then the issue had caught fire. Kennedy's own switchboard was alight with calls from all over the country, many from older people with fixed incomes who wanted to praise his stand against higher energy costs. The White House was bombarded, too, with most of the calls positive. One person wanted to tell the President he sounded exactly like Harry Truman...
...turned to a man in the telegraph room and asked for help. He got on the line with a jolly "Ho! Ho! Ho!" and a report from the North Pole for the five-year-old Caroline. A few minutes after Caroline hung up, the President's line was alight again. "Mary," asked a startled John Kennedy, "how did you do that...