Word: comprehend
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Mary Ann, a bright, prickly girl, is the author's most important observer, and it might be expected that events would arrange themselves so that she could see, if not wholly comprehend, what happens to the other characters. She does see a good deal, but unfortunately she misses more. 'No one, for instance, knows that Dan and the cheerfully manless Anna were lovers 15 years...
...find the ongoing controversy over fiction Expos both deeply disturbing and difficult to comprehend. The reasons for Mr. Marius's decision to cut Expos 13 and his alternative plans for Expos 18 strike me as misdirected actions to resolve a departmental conflict...
...there are writers who truly comprehend the vocabulary of science. Thomas Pynchon made physical laws part of the structure of Gravity's Rainbow, and science-fiction novelists routinely construct their speculative entertainments from the hard-and software of physics and chemistry. Among the masters of the genre is Stanislaw Lem, a mordant, satirical Pole whose novels and stories have been praised by readers as disparate as Critic Leslie Fiedler and Russian Cosmonaut Gherman Titov. Lem has written nearly 30 books, and his European sales are in the millions. (Ten of his works have been translated into English; most...
Though the two states have been closely scrutinizing each other for decades, they still seem astonishingly ignorant of the way each other's political systems function and the premises underlying policy decisions. Moscow, for instance, appears unable to comprehend the U.S. Congress's fundamental independence. After meeting with Soviet leaders last week, Senator Howard Baker, the Tennessee Republican, concluded that "the Soviet Union does not fully understand the role of the Senate debate" in ratifying SALT. Adds one U.S. expert: "The Soviets see the treaty in strict political terms. They see it as yes or no. Carter can either deliver...
...gardens, majestic mountains and mighty rivers, art and artifacts as old as civilization: they are all there, glittering, tangible and not quite believable. Off the usual tourist track are the ramshackle tenements, mud-walled village cottages and the grinding labor of the peasant, equally hard for the Westerner to comprehend. They will all become picture postcards of the mind, but on first encounter they are closer to hallucination than reality...