Word: comber
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...image is gripping: Mikhail Gorbachev as the daring surfer, nimbly sliding across a wave, vanishing into the spume, only to reappear, confidently using the giant comber looming over him to increase his speed. That is the Soviet President's way with crises. He seems to react to them faster than any of his rivals, skillfully turning them into vehicles to help accelerate his perestroika program and bolster his crusade against the immobile bureaucracy. Gorbachev's adroitness at converting danger into momentum is a high-risk performance that can make onlookers hold their breath as they wonder how long the daring...
OFFON the horizon, a powerful swell was starting to form, and Norman Podhoretz--liberal lefty New York Norman Podhoretz--had his eye on it. It was a powerful comber, powerful enough to wash away much of the sandcastle consensus of the 1960s. But it didn't wash away Norman No, he was up on top, surfing like a native cutting back and forth across the face of the wave, dazzling has new friends and dismaying his old buddies. Why We Were in Vietnam proves the transition--from a man who used to write ponderous articles against the war (didn...
...spoons, and butter-knives were but a dream in Shreve, Crump of Low's darkest recesses. But if Alvin Toffler heard you he would scold, consigning you to the First Wave, which began with the original harvest. For Toffler is a visionary, looking out to sea at that big comber waiting to smash the sandcastles of today--this Third Wave, the biggest, most powerful, most blessed of all. "The Third Wave," he notes in the introduction, "is for those who think the human story, far from ending, has only just begun...
Scott can do little with moments like these, but he does wonders with many others. His performance searches out the Hemingway man beneath the macho mask-harsh but affectionate, exacting but forgiving, an aging beach comber sifting through the wreckage of his life for those few irreducible fragments of value that might justify it. He gets a surprisingly strong boost from David Hemmings, the onetime hip photographer in Blow-Up, who here turns in a pungent character portrayal as a local hanger-on equally devoted to Hudson...
Then for the first time since the emergency began seconds before, Miller was able to look out at the right wing. The end of the wing was engulfed in white fire that curled upward in a ghastly comber, spitting fragments of molten metal into the air. What Miller could not see, because his view was blocked by the inboard engine, was even more chilling. No. 4 engine had dropped off, ripping a hole in the wing skin and puncturing the wing tip tank, igniting its 70 gal. of kerosene. One-third of its 83-ft. right wing was gone. Aerodynamically...