Word: casket
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some managed to surge past a force of Revolutionary Guards, clambering into the casket to plant kisses on the Imam's face. The corpse spilled to the ground, bare feet protruding from beneath the white shroud. As the Guards beat back the crowds, firing shots in the air and spraying fire hoses, other soldiers shoved the body and coffin back into the chopper. It lifted off with the casket hanging precariously out the door...
...America!" filled the air as the helicopter touched down. Although barricades held most of the crowd at bay, the Guards were forced to make a frantic push past the outstretched hands to deliver the coffin to the grave site. At the last instant, the metal lid of the casket was ripped off, and the body was rolled into the grave, in keeping with an Islamic tradition that requires that the dead be interred in only a shroud. The grave was quickly covered with concrete slabs and a large freight container to prevent delirious mourners from exhuming the corpse...
...entered the public domain on the loading dock of Parkland Hospital. "I can't stand it," muttered one of the journalists watching. "Like dirty laundry out the back door." Jackie carried what dignity was left. Face stained, clothes marked with dried blood, eyes straight ahead, hand on the bronze casket as it was wheeled down the ramp. Several aides walked beside Jackie. The whole bright prospect of their new world shaped by their friend and leader had been vaporized in an instant by Oswald...
Jackie was helped into the white hearse to ride with Kennedy's body to Air Force One. Everything about the scene was small and colorless -- casket salesman, disheveled reporters, unpainted concrete, exhaust fumes, arguing police and security men, traffic grinding by on a freeway...
...After faltering in recent years, Westlake recoups in perhaps the most beguiling beheading of journalists since Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. The targets are the tabloid weeklies that feature UFO sightings, no-dieting diets and a "body in a box," that is, surreptitious photos of a dead celebrity in his casket. Rather than mock the already preposterous, Westlake explores the mentality that capable, rational people would need in order to crank out such stuff. In a particularly wry inversion of the norms of detective fiction, a young woman reporter bursts into the newsroom on her first day to tell her bosses...