Word: driest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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CALVINO tackles questions that have puzzled the driest and most difficult literary critics of the century, but he does not share their obsession for inventing or redefining terms. He does not bully the reader with tortuous grammar, or leave gaps and ambiguities in his logic as examples of the defects in language itself; his sentences are clear and simple. "There is a lightening of language," Calvino posits, "whereby meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the meaning itself takes on the same rarefied consistency...
...necessary for archaeology to do a good job of reconstructing culture," Sandburg says. And for Sandburg archaeology is far more than big holes and little artifacts. "Dead archaeology is the driest dust that blows," Sandburg says, quoting Mortimer Weiler, one of his favorite writers. "The best archaelogists make things stand up, make them come to life," he explains. "You have to use as many sources as you can and you try to come up with a three-dimensional version of what really went on. It's like making a pop-up picture...
...economy needs particularly urgent attention. Parts of the country are suffering through the driest year of the century, a drought that could easily become as wasting as that in Ethiopia. As a result, the country is producing less and less food for more and more mouths as flocks of starving refugees crowd over the borders from parched neighbors, especially Ethiopia and Chad. Sudan is already sheltering 1.2 million refugees, and up to 4,000 newcomers arrive every...
Roiled since 1982 by prodigious storms, the 30-mile-wide Great Salt Lake has risen 10 ft., its fastest climb ever, overspilling its borders and flooding the land around it. What was once the driest state in the union after Nevada is fast becoming a water wasteland: tens of millions of dollars' worth of property has been destroyed, wildlife has diminished catastrophically, and tourism around the lake has bottomed out. Says Utah Governor Scott Matheson, with tragicomic wit: "It's a helluva way to run a desert...
...wettest of times, it was the driest of times. Devastating summer storms pounded places begging for relief from flooding, while the scorching sun broiled farmlands thirsting for rain. For the first time in three years, a full-blowing hurricane slammed onto the U.S. mainland, rumbling through Texas with a counterclockwise crunch of 115-m.p.h. winds. Galveston was swamped. Window panes popped from Houston's glass-and-steel towers, spewing shards over the streets below. What was hell in Texas held out some heavenly hopes for parts of the parched heartland, where the corn is withering on the stalks...