Word: ballasted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...free fall ever. For his transatlantic antic, Kittinger took off from Caribou, Me., in a ten-story-tall helium-filled balloon named Rosie O'Grady's. He made landfall three nights later at Capbreton, France, but decided against a descent in the dark. The following afternoon, with ballast low and a storm approaching, he and Rosie were finally ready to settle down near Savona, Italy. "I knew it was going to be an interesting landing," recalls Kittinger, who was thrown from the basket as Rosie hit some trees. Jubilant despite a broken foot, he had just one regret...
...high-strung baby boomers have mostly passed 30 and are trotting toward 40: they have chosen careers, settled down, married, stabilized. Families and mortgages act as ballast. Furthermore, such a fresh, burgeoning stake in the future naturally fosters hope for the future. In political terms, a concern for the next century can turn right or left, toward economic conservatism, for instance, or toward a special determination to avoid nuclear war. Or up, into sheer ambition. Says Yippie turned Yuppie Jerry Rubin: "People are very patriotic. I'm much more pro-American than I have ever been in my life...
...Lighthouse is told in the third person, there is no real narrator, causing the reader to slip from mind to mind with no perceptible voice to bridge the gaps. All that floating free sometimes can give readers mental seasickness. To avoid this, most authors use plot for ballast. The plot structures the thoughts, the thoughts give added resonance to the "real events." In A.N. Wilson's Wise Virgin, however, the balance breaks down, and plot and ideas end up in a predictable and boring...
Author Dexter, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, piles on more complications and coincidences than his novel ought to carry. What saves God's Pocket from flighty sensationalism is its impressive ballast of local color. The fictional neighborhood named in the title is a white, working-class enclave in South Philadelphia that seems all too real: narrow houses, streets, lives; a place where the Hollywood Bar, the social hub of the area, does "half its business before noon." Some of the novel's best times are spent at the Hollywood. Mickey hears a drunken woman praise...
...giant CH-46 helicopter lifted off slowly from its landing pad inside the U.S. Marine compound, its pilot careful to avoid jerking the huge netted crate that hung like ballast beneath it. With machine gunners at the ready, it whirred low over the beachside terrain and headed for U.S. Navy ships on the horizon, there to set down its cargo just as gingerly. Meanwhile, 400 yds. to the west, a steady stream of landing craft nosed into a heavily fortified jetty and began collecting a seemingly endless line of forklift pallets lashed to more wooden crates. "The beach has been...