Word: beset
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...youngsters' very "inability to do sustained reading, frustrating the youth at school and cutting off a major avenue of escape from the limits of what is usually a mean and sordid environment, that tends to breed rebellious delinquency." Concludes Lacy: "Life itself is often shocking, beset with temptation, surrounded with sordidness . . . Frightened ignorance is no good preparation" to meet these. But a youngster who has been prepared for these shocks with honesty will have "little to fear from his encounter with the pages of any book...
...When the beset Prado defied Publisher Beltrán to do any better himself, the critic decided that he belonged onstage: "Like missionaries who go among the savages and must be prepared to face being eaten, we independent newspapermen and honest politicians should be prepared for the worst." Peru's economy was in such sorry shape that the sol had dropped from 19 to the dollar to 31.5. The simple act of making Beltrán Premier checked the decline. Then Beltrán stopped the currency printing presses that La Prensa had long cartooned as a loathsome, hairy...
...with "no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain businessman of the republic, there for the one single purpose of getting that command across the river in the shortest time possible." Grant learned by doing, and learned slowly. Leading his regiment against the Confederates for the first time, he was beset by a "cold, unreasoned sort of panic," and would have turned back except that he "lacked the moral courage" to give the order. When he discovered that the enemy forces had abandoned their position, he learned his first lesson: "The other fellow had just as much reason to be afraid...
Four Drinks. When a Bushongo family is beset by unusual hardship-perhaos a sick child, or bad crops-the head of the family calls in a diviner who, clutching the patient's hand, calls off the names of possible witches who might be responsible for the curse. If at the mention of a name the family head jerks his head, the diviner has a suspect. The local misheke then produces a poison from the powdered bark of the ihumi tree and, gathering all the villagers to drink, spikes the suspect's cup with his lethal potion. After four...