Word: bend
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...green meadows and pine forests around Kozarac and Prijedor, stands of poplars, apple and plum orchards, haystacks and fields of unharvested corn and sunflowers evoke a peaceful pastoral dream. But along the road to Prijedor, a burned-out house suddenly appears around a bend. Then more follow, and more, maybe a thousand in all, relics of two-story, white-washed villas with broken red tile roofs. Windows are smashed, walls blackened by smoke. There are no shrapnel and bullet holes recording some battle here; this is what "ethnic cleansing" looks like a day or even an hour later. Laundry still...
Perhaps. For the moment, African glory lies around a historical bend of the river, in some unseeable future...
Because while home has always been where "they understand you," as you get older, it becomes "where they bend over backwards to understand you and cater to your every need...
...really wanted to tar-and-feather Perot, still says with admiration, "He galvanized the business leadership to get ((education reform)) done. He's a consensus player, as long as you sign up with him. He's a consensus of one." But Perot never understood political negotiation; he failed to bend when there was still room for accommodation. "Perot made school administrators his opponent," contends Mike Morrow, who headed the Texas Association of Professional Educators. "He'll have a hard time with compromise. If you say something he doesn't agree with, then he sees you as an adversary...
Like its two predecessors, The Gates of Ivory offers fascinating answers to such questions. For one thing, incorporating raw reality tends to bend a novel out of artistic shape. Drabble's principal narrator, who sometimes seems omniscient and at other times just as confused as the characters in the story, wonders at one point whether it is even justifiable to extract a novel from the chaos of modern life. "A queasiness, a moral scruple overcomes the writer at the prospect of selecting individuals from the mass of history, from the human soup. Why this one, why not another...