Word: detail
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...racketeering and fraud charges. For three days the bon temps Governor with silver hair and a golden tongue was by turns defiant and disarming, depicting himself as a loyal friend ("Man, I spent my life helping people, friends and enemies") and an absent-minded administrator ("I'm not a detail person"). Playing to the jury with the verve of a fiddler at a fais- dodo, the son of a Cajun sharecropper provoked chuckles from his courtroom claque, exasperation from the judge and testy objections from the federal prosecutor. Whether or not the jury finds his protestations persuasive when they begin...
...eleven nations of the European Space Agency (ESA). The close encounters were set for March because that is when the comet passes through earth's orbital plane, the same level in which the spacecraft travel. Over several whirligig days, the flotilla will scrutinize the comet in exhaustive detail, from the fuzzy gaseous cloud that surrounds its icy nucleus to the two tails that by then will be streaming for millions of miles behind...
...like a bent stovepipe will snap a photograph once every four seconds. The pictures will be instantly transmitted to earth and shown live on television. Mass spectrometers will analyze the composition of the dust from the nucleus, and other instruments will examine the properties of the ions in detail and measure the magnetic field girdling the comet's head. To prevent contamination of the surrounding space by the exhaust from Giotto's thrusters, controllers will turn off the engines at least 24 hours ahead of time. Says David Dale: "We don't want to come away from the encounter convinced...
...Renaissance man was more inspired as a boaster and self-promoter than as an artist. In Cellini (Abbeville; 324 pages; $85), Sir John Pope-Hennessy corrects this impression. Although much of Cellini's early work in precious metals vanished, enough sculpture survives (and is photographed here in careful detail) to convince anyone of its creator's genius. From the exquisite gold and enamel of The Saltcellar of Francis I to the muscular bronze of Perseus, the impression grows: Cellini was better than even he had the nerve to maintain...
...film's most powerful scenes, Lanzmann visits Israeli Jew and former Czech Abraham Bomba in Tel Aviv. With some coaxing from the director, Bomba recounts the story of his years at Treblinka. A professional barber, Bomba and several of his colleagues were chosen for the camp's special detail, spared the gas chamber but forced instead to prepare its victims, by shaving their heads. Day after day, he remembers, he and several others cut the hair of thousands of women, moments before their extermination, unaware of their fate...