Word: direly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Days in the Trees seems like a bad dream from which the playwright could not awaken. Nor can the actors who shudder convulsively with the dire reality...
Given some commonplace materials, a simple lab and a certain amount of fissionable uranium or plutonium, almost any competent physicist can build an atom bomb nowadays. This unfortunate fact of technological life has stirred dire warnings that sophisticated terrorist groups might build such bombs and use them to blackmail the world -a kind of ultimate crime. While the prospect causes a great deal of official worry, it also provides almost any competent thriller writer with a readymade plot that has everything: timeliness, tremendous stakes and, above all, the appalling specter of a mushroom cloud billowing over a peaceful land...
Survival, if by less dire means, is a subject for which Allan Carr has near-Andean credentials. He was hopelessly show-biz-struck as a kid named Alan Solomon in suburban Highland Park, Ill. At 21 he changed his last name and the spelling of his first. He landed a job as general manager of Chicago's Civic Theater, staging such productions as The World of Carl Sandburg, with Bette Davis and Gary Merrill. "I also flew in Carl Sandburg," Carr recalls superciliously, "who brought a little carton of goat's milk." The aspiring entrepreneur arrived in Hollywood...
...from Rockefeller's high-minded conviction that the Chase should be a good corporate citizen. To help bail out New York City, the Chase bought more of the city's notes and bonds than any other bank did-$408 million, at last count. The city's dire financial condition makes these investments unattractive. The bank has also spent $731 million in REITs (for real estate investment trusts). Since real estate was particularly hard hit by the recession, nearly three-quarters of the Chase's REITs are either producing no interest income or less than they were...
...opposition comes from Jimmy Carter, who is carefully organized and hopes to outspend Brown $500,000 to $200,000. Even if Brown beats him 2 to 1 in the popular vote, Carter could carry as many as 90 delegates and put his total beyond competitive reach. But Carter has dire disabilities. He is not well known; his appeal to blacks, so vital elsewhere, is muffled by Brown's near monopoly of the black political establishment...