Word: ascent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...speed and sudden force on the riders, the cars and the structure. This enables engineers to build roller coasters with the steepest possible inclines and most sharply banked curves to create the illusion of breakneck speed. All roller-coaster trains are actually gravity propelled after the initial chain-drawn ascent and thus steadily slow down from the first big hill onward...
There's also Paula Abdul, 27, the former Los Angeles Lakers cheerleader who became a choreographer, then singer and finally a superstar. Abdul's celebrity ascent has been so persistent (her album Forever Your Girl was in the Top Ten for 64 weeks and spawned five hit singles) and so dizzying that it hasn't left her time to make a follow-up record. Her newly released Shut Up and Dance is an album of Forever remixes slicked up at the sound board. The idea is to tide fans over until she finishes choreographing Oliver Stone's film biography...
...MEANS OF ASCENT by Robert A. Caro (Knopf; $24.95). This second volume of an extended biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson offers a hair-raising, white- knuckle ride through the 1940s, when its hero-villain clawed, scrambled and cheated his way toward the political mountaintop...
...MEANS OF ASCENT by Robert A. Caro; Knopf; 506 pages...
...override knowledge about how things turned out; they do so by recapturing the tensions and uncertainties of the participants while the outcome was in doubt. That Lyndon Baines Johnson, for example, became the 36th President will surprise no one now. But readers of Robert Caro's Means of Ascent are in for a white-knuckle, hair-raising tale that could have ended in any of a dozen different ways, with L.B.J. in the White House the longest shot of all. This is good history, and with a vengeance...