Word: details
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...phrase "Reagan is not a detail man" is a mantra among Reaganites and suggests that he sees the big picture, that "details" are for smaller minds. Yet such detachment can prove dangerous. In preparation for the Iceland summit, Reagan did not study the history and nuances of America's arms-control strategies; instead he practiced ways to sell Gorbachev on SDI. To get himself into the right frame of mind, he read Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising, a potboiler about a non-nuclear war between NATO and the Soviet bloc. On a political trip the day before he left...
Unfortunately, The Mosquito Coast (based on Paul Theroux's 1982 novel) is not a postcard. It is a movie, recording in painful detail the self-righteous Allie's trek toward a predictable tragedy, herding his long-suffering family before him as he goes. And though Harrison Ford offers a hypnotizing portrayal of a man covering despair with lunatic optimism, hysteria with bravado and rigid self-control, a fatal prejudice lingers in the audience: we do not want to spend a couple of hours with Allie here any more than we would if he were, heaven forfend, our next-door neighbor...
Totally self-effacing in the interests of her material, Elizabeth Schneider has written what may be the timeliest and most truly helpful book of the year. Uncommon Fruits and Vegetables (Harper & Row; $25) covers in detail all the exotic fruits and vegetables now appearing in produce departments across the country. In words and pictures she tells readers how to identify, buy, store, clean and prepare jicama, atemoya, daikon, nopales and calabaza, among dozens of others. Although some of the fruits and vegetables in this compendium are hardly uncommon to old-world chefs (celeriac, parsley root, arugula, broccoli rab and gooseberries...
...like his startling portrait of Manuel Hernandez Galvan, 1924, that use the subjects' plain vitality to confound the impassivity one expects from monumental figures. The Mexican portraits show that Weston had absorbed the principles delivered to him by Alfred Stieglitz, words that Weston later summarized as a "maximum of detail with a maximum of simplification...
...demonstration of virtuoso genetic engineering, but because it will provide scientists with a valuable research tool for studying how genes go about their business. By fusing the firefly gene to the genetic material of other plants and animals, biologists gain a visual cue $ that will help them understand in detail how genes -- strands of DNA whose structure acts as a sort of coded instruction manual -- tell different cells what their duties are within an organism. Armed with such specific knowledge, researchers may someday understand exactly why these instructions are occasionally garbled and, perhaps, why cancer and other gene-influenced diseases...