Word: almost
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Competition for the finest viewing spots--and for the most decadent tailgate--often proves almost as fierce as for the medals. Any of the six bridges under which the racers pass--B.U., River St., Western Ave., Anderson, Eliot and especially the Weeks Footbridge--draw the best reviews. Auto-racing fans, however, gravitate toward Eliot. as the tricky curve that preceeds it often causes watery carnage...
...interim--his last novel, Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry, was published almost ten years ago--McMahon keeps up appearances as a scientist and teacher. His field is biomechanics--how people work as machines, why animals grow to the sizes and shapes they do, why trees assume graceful shapes. McMahon designed Harvard's indoor track, which features a specially cushioned surface that improves a good runner's mile by as much as several seconds...
Methods aside, McMahon draws on a more direct connection between his work as a professor and his writing. Gordon McKay, protagonist of McKay's Bees, is a familiar name in Harvard science departments. About 50 scientists, including almost the whole faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences Department, owe their livelihood to his very large endowment. McMahon, one of the flock, pays tribute with his novel--"90 per cent of the book is lies about Gordon McKay," he says, though the last chapter, in which McKay returns to Cambridge, makes a fortune in shoe manufacturing, and befriends several Harvard faculty members...
This is also the story of an apartment in Bangkok, and tourists lured there by a pleasant Frenchman, a beacon of polite familiarity in an unfamiliar continent. Thompson describes how one by one, couples and lone tourists fell prey to the magic of Sobhraj. Sobhraj's powers are almost impossible to fathom--as even the author admits--but the naivete of those who fall into his trap is even harder to understand. "Months later," Thompson writers, "an Interpol detective in Paris, would study the case and wonder why in the name of God these poor people didn't figure...
...creation of this new legal right was almost an act of contrition by states ashamed of their complacency in the face of genocide. The U.N. was declaring dramatically that it must never happen again. And in taking such unprecedented measures it implicitly acknowledged the special place that had to be accorded to Jews after the war; war; not accidentally, in the period between the resolution and the convention, the U.N. passed the resolution mandating the creation of a Jewish state in partitioned Palestine...