Word: descent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...every country, often, and in every household. Ancient cultures, as in India and China, are eager to invite the future to come to stay, so long as it doesn't interfere with the way things have always been; software technicians in the Silicon Valley--many of Indian or Chinese descent--try to bring neighborhood to a virtual borderless world (even as their parents are cursing Sikhs, or debating about Mao Zedong). As James Gleick describes in his sobering new book Faster, a man with a watch knows what time it is, but a man with two watches is never sure...
...defined court-packing scheme and an unsuccessful attempt to purge his opponents in the 1938 by-elections. One must also concede the failures of vision that led to the forcible relocation of Japanese Americans, which deprived tens of thousands of men, women and children of Japanese descent of their fundamental civil liberties, and the devastating failure to bring more Jewish refugees into America before Hitler finally closed the doors to emigration...
...forebears were a blue-gray wolf and a fallow doe. The coupling of these legendary ancestors, of predator and prey, produced a human being from whom all Mongols would claim descent. But such fantastical beginnings did little to ease the early life of the world conqueror--unless the myth was an omen for living like a wild animal in the steppes around Lake Baikal. His father Yesugei was poisoned by enemies and his widowed mother Hoelun chased away from their tribe with her brood, including her eldest, nine-year-old Temujin. The outcasts ate field mice and marmots even...
...fund he helped set up with a subsidiary of the Chase Manhattan Bank to attract celebrity dollars has disintegrated. And the once worshipful buzz has suddenly turned ugly. In Hollywood, a town built on tales of golden boys brought down, the wags are debating the reasons for his steep descent...
...odds were against little Keone Penn from the start. Born with the most severe form of sickle-cell anemia, a hereditary blood disorder that afflicts more than 70,000 Americans, most of them of African descent, he experienced repeated episodes of racking pain and high fever as brittle, sickle-shaped red blood cells clogged his vessels. At age 5, he was temporarily paralyzed by a stroke. Since then he has bravely endured blood transfusions as often as every two weeks via a catheter attached to his chest. Still the threat of devastating pain and life-threatening infections continued to shadow...