Word: beckon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...life on the run that has finally slowed to a stumble. Now Francis is an alcoholic hobo on the sad side of 50. He wanders the Albany streets on a Halloween night in 1938, cadging free meals and hoping to make his peace with the phantoms who beckon to him from every trolley seat, backyard and yawning grave. So many lives behind him, and so many deaths. A man just wants to rock himself to sleep and not wake...
...road that leads to Gaza, a gaudily lettered arch greets travelers with the word WELCOME. But the sights hardly beckon. Watchful Israeli soldiers stand guard as men in gallabiyas ply the road on two-wheeled donkey carts and women in white gauze veils trail their robes through the dust. Melons are sold amid reeking garbage. Rusting wreckage litters the roadsides. The stench of rot and waste is unescapable. Gaza looks like what it is: the last refuge of the dispossessed...
This Christmas the pair may be called He-Man and She-Ra, and their blond manes and mesomorphic torsos beckon from shelves in nearly every toy store in the nation. In other times the wandering children have been differently named and more modestly dressed. Observes Roger Sale, a professor of English at the University of Washington: "A girl is in a wood. Give her a brother, and one has Hansel and Gretel . . . send the girl to dwarfs, and one has Snow White. Make the girl a boy, and one might have Jack, either the one who climbs beanstalks...
...doors of Holyoke Center Information Office beckon. As I turn to smile nastily at old shifty-eyes, I find him charging past me. Shifty-eyes has made his move...
...only after his stem-winder at the 1984 Democratic National Convention (a speech he today regards as far too emotional) that Mario Cuomo pierced the larger American consciousness. Already this year he has been asked to speak in nearly every state; colleges beckon him with offers of commencement addresses. Democratic fund raisers say that his name is a magnet for money. Wherever he speaks, he dazzles audiences with his verbal virtuosity and moves them with the evocation of his oft-repeated theme of family: "The sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all." "He's the most exciting...