Word: cataclysms
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...piece builds over a slow, droning, continually repeated chordal procession called Musica Mundana (Music of the Spheres). Says Crumb: "I like sounds that never stop." He also likes a good explosion or two. Halfway along comes a percussive cataclysm that shakes the rafters like a latter-day The Rite of Spring. At the end, the glistening harmonics from three solo violins perched high in a rear balcony evoke a paradisiacal kingdom where the chil dren of light will reign...
Then again during the second World War, America threw her weight on the side of freedom and humanitarianism against Fascism and the totalitarian states, paying for the freedom of the world with her blood. Once the cataclysm was over, she again mounted a vast program of generous aid and assistance to Allied countries, as well as to former enemies. This had no parallel in the annals of mankind and eventually transformed the destinies of those nations. It is also a sign of the great resilience of the American nation that out of all the upheavals of the past 200 years...
This farcical circle of palace revolts is interrupted by the reverberations of a European cataclysm: The Great War. While a massacre by the Head of State provokes brief, tongue-clucking scandal in the French press, the tales of Hun atrocities shock Latin Americans who believed, above all, in the civilization of Europe. And the ideology that fills the moral vacuum left by the collapse of the old cultural value is Marxism...
...Napoleon focuses on one of the most complex and ideologically riven epochs in history. Unfortunately, it is a period that fits awkwardly into the Durants' Procrustean formula. Merely to introduce Bonaparte into destiny's pages requires a recapitulation of the entire French Revolution. The Durants compress that cataclysm to 152 pages-an entertaining but misshapen account. The causes of the infamous Terror are summed up in a brief section, leaving the reader reeling under a scattershot assault of dates and statistics. The guillotine devours French leaders at such a bewildering pace that the list of names often reads...
Among sci-fi's most tired conventions is the one in which some latter-day cataclysm releases from an aeons-long sleep a monstrous prehistoric creature who rampages around for eight or nine reels until the combined brains of the military-scientific-industrial complex figure out a novel ploy to dispatch the thing...