Word: dreadful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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These twelve stories issue up-to-the-minute dispatches from the sexual wars, and the news is not good for either side. The men, selfish and distracted, bolt at the first hint of that dread word, commitment. The women work at being hip and wary but are as overmastered by virility as any Victorian maiden ("With his touch, the will seemed to drain out of her"). Susan Minot, who made a notable debut with her 1986 novel Monkeys, has a laser instinct for the clinching detail and the giveaway phrase. She can summon descriptive power when she wants it ("Clouds...
...words. If he produces more, he notes with a laugh, he invariably writes less the following day. On average it takes Naipaul about a year to compose a book. "I'm with it all the time, anxious to get to the end," he says with a hint of dread. "When I'm finished, I do nothing. It takes a week before I even begin to feel tired." To keep in shape, he performs a daily exercise taught to him years ago by a family pundit in Trinidad. It is a difficult yoga bend that leaves the writer arched backward with...
...Dagwood Bumstead types, the old-fashioned manual lawn mower was a suburban symbol of dread. Among modern-day gentry who want to get a little exercise and avoid fouling the neighborhood with noise and exhaust pollution, however, the motorless mower is making a quiet comeback. Sales of reel mowers by the American Lawn Mower Co. of Shelbyville, Ind., reached 100,000 last year, a 47% increase over 1986. Average price: less than $100, in contrast to $250 or more for motorized models...
Seldom are glory and dread quite so thoroughly mingled for so many. And seldom is history played out on such a grand scale, minute by minute, before such an enormous global audience. Though the drama had been building all week, the countdown began early Saturday morning, after Li announced in a televised speech that "we must end the turmoil swiftly" and ordered troops into the city. While Li's raspy voice echoed from Tiananmen Square's loudspeakers, sirens wailed and blue lights flashed as an ambulance arrived to take away yet another weakened hunger striker. A full moon, shrouded...
...couldn't have imagined this would happen in my wildest fantasies," marveled artist Dread Scott Tyler. What astonished him was the mobs of outraged veterans and others who gathered daily at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to protest his controversial work featuring an American flag stretched on the floor. Until the exhibition closed last week, politicians, patriots and just plain folks joined in angrily condemning what they believed was desecration of Old Glory...