Word: defective
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What rescued The Hunt from the publishing boneyard was Clancy's gripping narrative. Navy buffs and thriller adepts have been mesmerized by the story of Soviet Submarine Captain Marko Ramius, who seeks to defect to the U.S., bringing a billion-dollar present with him. This is Red October, a ballistic- missile-armed submarine, or "boomer," equipped with a new, silent propulsion system. In a message to his superior in Moscow, Ramius challenges the whole Soviet navy to catch him. He then takes off for Norfolk, together with a group of equally disaffected officers and an unsuspecting crew. Moscow dispatches...
...need to earn a living made him put his literary ambitions aside for the insurance business. The writing urge resurfaced in 1976 when Clancy read about a mutiny aboard the Soviet frigate Storozhevoy. The ship's political officer and a group of enlisted men had attempted to defect to Sweden, and most of them had been killed. "That mutiny rattled around in my head for years," Clancy recalls. Eventually the frigate was imagined as a submarine, and the novel began to take shape. He completed a first draft in six months. The finished manuscript was read by two submarine officers...
...discontinuity. The same conservative instinct is an important reason why there is no codified process for changes in command and no real tradition of how such changes should be made. The Kremlin's obsession with continuity is confirmed by former Diplomat Arkady Shevchenko, the highest-ranking Soviet official to defect since World War II (see SPECIAL SECTION). Says he: "They have never decided on a new leader before the old one is dead"--or, in the case of Nikita Khrushchev, deposed by collective agreement. Adds Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a Soviet expert at Washington's Brookings Institution: "How could it be otherwise...
...infant's bones are so pliable that considerable force is required to break them, but in Allison's case, the tibia, the major bone of the lower leg, had snapped like a pretzel. When doctors examined the child, they found that she was suffering from a rare congenital defect known as pseudarthrosis (false joint) of the tibia. In the one out of 140,000 children who is born with this condition, a leg bone may be so weak and unstable that it gives way almost as easily as a knee joint. Fully 50% of these children ultimately lose the affected...
...Only Connect" was Forster's epigraph for Howards End, a plea to unite civilized ponds with subterranean wells of feeling. Unfortunately, he had no exact idea until age 30 of how men and women made love, a defect that Author Katherine Mansfield tartly noted in Howards End: "I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella...