Word: drabs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...despite some lively writing, much of her tale of the settlers who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony involves internecine Calvinist squabbling. Thankfully, Vowell, author of the sharply funny armchair histories Assassination Vacation and The Partly Cloudy Patriot, injects a bit of Technicolor into her portraits of the stereotypically drab colonists: feisty prefeminist Anne Hutchinson, semicrazed zealot Roger Williams and the colony's first governor, John Winthrop, who coined the phrase city on a hill in a 1630 sermon to describe his hopes for the settlement. That vision--of a community of God's chosen people that would inspire the world...
...another, a battle of wits between psychiatrist and patient. But it doesn't take long to ferret out Shaffer's sometimes overexplicit theme - that old chestnut about the "insane" being more authentically alive than those of us leading ordered, conformist, "normal" lives. "The boy has created out of his drab existence a passion more ferocious than any I have known in any second of my life," says Dr. Dysart. "That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time. 'At least I galloped...
Radovan Karadzic's last lair wasn't a cave or a safe house; no secret bolt-holes or special security details shielded him. Instead, the former Bosnian Serb leader, one of the world's most wanted men, was hiding in plain view amid the drab, anonymous housing blocks of New Belgrade, a suburb of the Serbian capital. He was nabbed not by NATO, whose forces had spent 12 years in a vain and sometimes desultory search for him, but by the security forces of Serbia - the country whose designs for grandeur he had so ardently tried to further...
...special powers in strange surroundings is as old as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and, before that, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - not to mention every fable about a commoner revealed as having royal blood and reserves of derring-do. It's the essential wish-fulfillment template: start in drab, constricting reality; hyper-drive into heroism...
...might have benefited from a broader scope that told us more about her fellow escorts--those who don't, say, blithely name-drop Luis Buñuel flicks. In the Spitzer case, reporters eventually tracked down his regular date, "Kristen," an aspiring singer with a MySpace page. The drab details we glimpsed--would-be American Idol ends up with a bit part in Fallen Idol--contrasted ironically with the club's play-pretend trappings of emperors and diamonds (the basis for its pricing scale...