Word: detailism
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...redress this problem, among them Jill Nelson's 1993 memoir, Volunteer Slavery, the lives of these women beg for further elaboration. Happily, Nelson's new memoir, Straight, No Chaser (Putnam; 225 pages; $23.95), and Gwendolyn M. Parker's Trespassing (Houghton Mifflin; 209 pages; $23) provide some of the missing detail...
...archaic crudity that normally attends the birth of a style. They can be marvelously refined, like the 7th century to 8th century standing figure of the Buddha of the afterlife, the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. There is a perfect balance between the abstraction of the limbs, the rich linear detail of the costume and the benign, almost feminine roundness of this Buddha's torso...
...large part, she acts a bit like a stargazing astronomer, surveying the skies for an interesting sight, then analyzing it in painstaking detail. In a chapter called "Heat Wave," for example, she zooms in on the development of the climate control system and the subsequent battle for incoming air waged by the different engineering factions. The engine guys needed the air to cool their oil and transmission fluids, the fuel folks wanted it to keep the alternator from overheating, and--of course--the climate people had to have enough air to pump into the interior. They could solve the whole...
...practice of land reclamation, houses the world's busiest container port, with more than 100 ships arriving daily. Then, as the late hours of the afternoon arrive, the Indian fortune tellers, the joggers and California-style bladers, the myriad of couples waiting for dusk to come, all provide picturesque detail to the majestic scenario of the bay and Hong Kong Island's towering skyscrapers and elegant buildings. But the real magic lies elsewhere, in the labyrinth of streets and cavernous meadows where the multifaceted realities of the metropolis reveal their enigmas. From 8 p.m. to shortly after midnight, Temple Street...
...toured what was left of old Nauvoo and learned that Smith had run his growing church from an office above his family's general store. I liked this detail. It brought the man alive for me. Unlike Brigham Young, the stern puritan who succeeded him, Smith was an improviser, a boyish mystic, brimming with charismatic, homegrown visions. In the fields beyond his store, he liked to dress up as a general and drill his personal army, the Nauvoo Legion. In 1844, the year he was murdered, he announced a quixotic candidacy for the U.S. presidency...