Word: blackest
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...physical, the damage not always measured in coffins and cracked pillars. Just as the port city of Kobe stirred painfully back to life last week from the quake that killed more than 5,000 people and left 300,000 homeless, a psychological temblor hit the Tokyo exchange. On the blackest trading day in nearly four years, the Tokyo exchange's Nikkei average shed 1,054 points, or 5.6% of value, as investors began to size up the blow Japan had suffered. Among the army of construction crews that moved in to occupy Kobe last week, a Tobishima Corp. supervisor surveyed...
What remained of that mindless optimism-inflation had already eroded it badly-was exploded by the Arab oil embargo and energy crisis of 1973. Almost overnight, opinion swung to the blackest pessimism: the industrial West would be permanently crippled by oil shortages, while Middle Eastern sheiks and emirs raked in -well, just about all the money in the world. One economist, who has since become one of the most respected and powerful in the country, prophesied that in a few years motorists on the New Jersey Turnpike would see oil refineries adorned with signs written in Arabic and pictures...
...remains as vivid as it is out of this world. One morning, three days before she was to enter the hospital for surgery, Gary answered the doorbell. Standing on the step was a large man, a good inch taller than her 6-ft. 5-in. husband. "He was the blackest black I've ever seen," Ann says, "and his eyes were a deep, deep azure blue." The stranger introduced himself simply as Thomas. And then he told her that her cancer was gone...
...inch-deep, twittering, murder-in-the-vicarage whodunits. We do care about Red Square, though not really because of the puzzle -- better than routine but less than grand-master quality -- that the author sets up and then solves. We know what to expect. The shabby, battered hero, Arkady, unravels blackest villainy, as he must, from Moscow to Munich, on to Berlin and back to Moscow; unbelievably escapes, as he must, a variety of murderous attacks; leaves a trail of defunct hard guys; and, as we knew he would be when we opened the book, is still standing, bleeding lightly...
There is also human nature, which, as Cooper's tales present it, is a sorry thing. Sophistication doesn't improve it: the bloodiest deed in the Leatherstocking tales, a frontier My Lai, is the responsibility of a French aristocrat. Nor does the simple life guarantee innocence. Cooper's blackest villain is an Indian, his second blackest a hermit trapper who hunts scalps for bounty. The scene in which the trapper, scalped himself and dying, fears he may go to hell, is one of the most powerful Cooper ever wrote, and it owes its power to ethical earnestness as much...