Word: dreadfulness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...leaders of the free world's seven strongest industrial nations were in the process of donning formal dress for a state dinner with Emperor Hirohito of Japan when aides brought the news that all of them had awaited with dread. On the other side of the globe in Geneva, the OPEC ministers had once again jacked up the world price of oil, and the bite was fully as bad as gloomy prophets had predicted?and perhaps worse. The cartel's complex system of base quotes and surcharges works out to an average price of between...
...Scheherazade. Livia stands comfortably on its own as a polished romance filled with bright, interesting characters. They gather in the 1930s at Avignon, home of the medieval and mysterious Knights Templars. The air is "full of the scent of lemons and mandarines and honeysuckle" and of something else: dread of the future that Hitler is planning across the border in Germany. Durrell is still prone to overripe passages, but some of his audacious effects work memorably. He describes the madam of a French brothel sitting in her establishment, "enthroned in wigged splendour like a very very old ice cream...
...suddenly attacked by a knife-wielding Acholi woman who slashed off his genitals, stuffed them in his mouth and then slit open his stomach. Taken into custody, she explained that she had waited five years to avenge the murder of her husband by agents of Amin's dread State Research Bureau, who had killed him in exactly the same...
Lifton sees another, more controversial psychological device at work. Because most cultures fear dying, one way to combat that dread is to look around for an enemy that symbolizes death. For the Nazis, it was the Jews, who had long been portrayed as Christ killers. Says Lifton: "If you view the Jews as death-tainted, then killing them seems to serve life." In Lifton's eyes, those who look upon the Nazis or their medical henchmen simply as maddened sadists are on the wrong track. "Most killing is not done out of sadism, not even most Nazi killing," says...
...times a year, high school students converge on test centers nationwide for a fearsome academic ritual: the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which helps determine where tens of thousands of students will go to college. In theory, there is little that students can do to prepare for the dread day, since the S.A.T. supposedly measures innate ability, not learned skills. In practice, however, more students each year desperately cram for the S.A.T.s. A third of public and private schools in the Northeast now offer some sort of S.A.T. preparation course. Elsewhere around the country, thousands of nervous scholars flock to commercial coaching...