Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...long, sardonic novel, by turns philosophical and comic and fantastic. In the book's opening scene, two middle-aged Indian actors fall 29,002 feet from a jetliner that has just been exploded by terrorists over the English Channel. They have an animated conversation as they hurtle toward earth; they land safely, but then their troubles begin anew. Along the way, the author writes about his schooling and young adulthood in Britain, about his love for Bombay and about the death of his father. He explores the roots ! of his Muslim faith and retells some legends of the Prophet Muhammad...
...city in an uproar. In two years construction is scheduled to begin on the $4.4 billion Central Artery project, the rebuilding of a highway that runs through the heart of downtown Boston. To relocate much of the highway underground, workers will have to excavate 13 million sq. yds. of earth, tearing up countless sewers and other subterranean tunnels. The problem: they are home to untold thousands of the city's rats, one of the largest such colonies in the country. Rudely evicted, the critters will emerge on the surface and start looking around for new homes...
...often as every millisecond. Now the mystery seems to be solved. Last week an international team of astronomers announced that they had detected a pulsar emerging from the murky dust clouds left over from Supernova 1987A, a giant star that exploded about 170,000 light-years from earth and was first seen two years...
Because the new pulsar is so young, it is spinning almost unimaginably fast. Its "day" is only one two-thousandth of a second long, and while the earth's equator rotates at about 1,000 m.p.h., the pulsar's is moving at more than 200 million m.p.h. By rights, the pulsar should fly apart, but it is so dense -- a teaspoon of it would weigh 300,000 tons on earth -- that its gravity holds it together. Says Richard Muller of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, a member of the discovery team: "We can't help being astounded by what we are seeing...
Most of all, there is disillusion and frustration. Sergeant Zeke Anderson (Terence Knox), the sympathetic Everysoldier in Tour of Duty, confides to his ex-wife his feelings about the war: "It's just like everything you hear. It's death and destruction, it's hell on earth, it's twisted limbs. I just want it to be over." An injured grunt in China Beach expresses his despair even more starkly: "Nobody here gets out alive. Breathing maybe. Eating. Sleeping. You ride the bus to work, cash a paycheck, wait. But your life is out there . . . always...