Word: aridities
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...arid-and cactiferous-wastes of southern Texas, where even today the cowboys say you can see farther, and see less, than anywhere else on earth, John Nance Garner carved a hefty fiefdom along the Rio Grande and parlayed his brand of conservative populism (with due regard for the interests of cattle, oil and Democratic regularity) into 46 years of power. His political personality was quintessentially Texan: grass-rooted, plainspoken, coyote-cunning, and he set a style of congressional clout that made him perhaps the most influential Vice President in U.S. history...
From the Mexican border to north of Los Angeles, throughout an arid strip 200 miles long, a series of fires raged for three days. Fueled by humidity as low as 1%, temperatures in the 90s and wind shrieking at 70 m.p.h., the fires blackened 109,068 acres, routed more than 5,000 people from their homes, killed five and caused at least $6,000,000 damage...
Fences may make bad neighbors, but rivers can drive them wild. When the flooding Rio Grande between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez switched course in 1864, it hefted the U.S.-Mexican border south and thereby shifted to the U.S. an arid, chop-shaped patch of land known as El Chamizal (The Thicket). The transfer exacerbated American-Mexican relations for a century...
...power of Sir Laurence Olivier, whose undisputed ability to depict fallen tragic heroes is matched by his less-famed skill at depicting tragicomic grotesque nobodies. Death's nobody is Edgar, an aging Swedish army captain quartered on an island. Symbolically, it is an out post of hell, an arid devil's island of an awful marriage that has lasted almost 25 years. Wife Alice (Geraldine McEwan) is a viper-vampire, bleeding her husband of self-respect. She refuses to let him forget that he never rose to the rank of major, that his only accomplishment is an obsolete...
Whether in devastated wartime London or an overgrown jungle throbbing to the heart of the matter, the landscape of Graham Greene's novels is inexorably arid and sere. Yet in the midst of a life that is rather worse than purgatory and scarcely better than hell, his characters are touched by a vagrant grace. The Comedians, for which he wrote a script based on his novel, is Greeneland all over again, this time in Haiti. Off a ship and into the damned, doomed country walk three anonyms: Brown, Jones and Smith...