Word: details
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...next thing I knew. I was stretched out on one of those green tables, the precious life-fluid running from my vein to a bag out of my sight. Lying on my back. I could view the Mem Hall stained glass windows in all their exquisite detail, a treat that students gazing down at blue exam books rarely enjoy. Dante, Chaucer and Blake smiled benignly upon the whole affair...
Evans didn't like to talk much about his past, and friends often heard conflicting stories. He would never talk with them in any detail about the break-up of his two marriages. It was difficult for him to deal with his own success: when photographs were first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in the early 40's, he would walk around the block every day watching the crowds go in, but he could never bring himself to go in and see the show. He describes "dancing in the streets of the Village" the day Wall Street crashed...
Adams is absolutely first-rate at making the reader feel the river mist on his face, feel the brush of wet leaves across the skin of arms and thighs, or smell the stench of a sodden bear. This extraordinary ability to evoke physical detail carries the book to whatever success it has. Where the author seems weak is in the sentimentality of his conceptions. These shape what is not meant to be a children's tale into a kind of pretentious adolescent bluff: a tragic chronicle of conquest, corruption and decline that dribbles off into happily-ever-after...
...their coarse, nimble ponies, they rode like centaurs. They made cloaks from tanned scalps, and the skin of a right arm would furnish a container for their arrows. ("The skin of a man," noted Herodotus, who could seldom resist a piquant detail, "is thick and glossy, and whiter than almost all other hides.") To relax, they got uproariously drunk on thick wine from the Black Sea area, which they quaffed from the leather-bound skulls of their foes, or they would dump marijuana seeds on red-hot stones and breathe the smoke. Fortunately for archaeology, they buried their dead kings...
...manuscript, is seamless and vibrant, and adds a rare tragic work by Rossini to the stock of his popular comic operas. Schippers is apparently as good at sewing musical segments together as Rossini, who constantly borrowed from old operas to write new ones, and who was so cavalier about detail that if a page of his manuscript fell to the floor while he was composing, he'd write a new one from memory, being too obese to bend down comfortably to pick up the original...