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...turned out, of a light-gathering mirror that had been ground with exquisite precision, but in the wrong shape. After a lengthy investigation, the disaster was laid to a simple, dumb mistake: a technician had assembled a device that guided the mirror-grinding process with one bolt put on backward. The hobbled Hubble could still do some important science, but much of its research program appeared headed out the window. "I'd been working on this for almost two decades," says Bahcall. "I was devastated...
...American civilization, describes a meeting he had with President John F. Kennedy '40. The year was 1962, and Donald had just delivered a talk on Abraham Lincoln in the White House. Donald recalls that President Kennedy, "thinking no doubt of how his own administration would look in the backward glance of history," told him that "No one has a right to grade a President -- who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk and learned why he made his decisions...
...more pedestrian novelist and playwright. His memoir lacks the sharp, confident voice of his essays, while the characters, like those in his novels and plays, often come across as wooden and two dimensional. He complains over and over to the reader of his frayed memory, his disinclination to look backward, his lack of a diary (he relies altogether too much on other people's memoirs instead). As a result, Palimpsest has a kind of haphazard feel, with the present frequently intruding upon the past in a way that distracts from his narrative. (''The editor of the [New York Times] editorial...
...jumped to the ground, looked around and felt as if I had been propelled backward in time. Shimmering in the heat of the sun was an earth-and-wood fortress ringed by pillboxes. But for the greenness, A Shau had a French Foreign Legion quality, Beau Geste without the sand. I stood there asking myself the question I am sure Roman legionnaires must have asked in Gaul-What the hell am I doing here...
...cautious tread accompanied by a few high-pitched notes in the violins, pregnant with mystery and menace. As he reaches the landing, a door flies open in a glint of flashing steel: suddenly the strings shriek rhythmically, as the knife blade slashes down and the stricken cop topples backward to his death in a symphony of pizzicato cellos and basses. We not only see his death; we hear it as well...