Word: descent
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Living Character. Shortly after Gary's novel first came out in France in 1956, Gary had a long letter from a game warden living in the Ivory Coast territory of French West Africa. Raphael Matta, a Frenchman of Italian descent, seemed Morel sprung to uncanny life-though Gary and Matta had never met or heard the other's name. Like Morel, Matta had undergone a shattering World War II experience. An exploding land mine almost took his life, and left him totally deaf...
...Williams traces his descent across four centuries to St. Francis' brother Valentine...
Regress into Cinema. In prose that is often witty and sometimes arch, Author Sanders (who swears he is ghostless) describes his descent into cinema villainy. No memoir can be got under way properly without the introduction of a clotty relative, and the author, who was born into a wealthy St. Petersburg family, recalls with admiration the pre-Revolution pastime of his favorite uncle, who used to lie in bed with a .22 pistol and shoot flies which gathered on the ceiling to eat the jam he had smeared there. Footmen stood by, Sanders recalls, with champagne, ammunition and more...
...meantime, with free diving still a new sport, Cousteau urges swimmers to take down an underwater lamp ("The colors that will emerge are incredible"), suggests a descent in open ocean for the more experienced ("Nothing above, nothing below, nothing on either side-it is an astonishing impression"). Beyond that, Skindiver Cousteau does not presume to pinpoint the pleasures of his sport. "What would you advise a baby to do when it is first born?" asks Cousteau. "When a person takes his first dive, he is born to another world...
...field of conflicting claims, skindivers believe that the deepest descent with held breath was made by a Greek sponge diver named Stotti Georghios, who in 1913 swam down 200 ft. to put a line on the lost anchor of an Italian battleship. Dumas' dive to 307 ft. with an Aqua-Lung is regarded as the record fro free diving...