Word: frail
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Harris takes for his hero a neurasthenic mathematician named Tom Jericho, frail, distracted, fluky even by the measure of other code breakers at Bletchley, a town west of Cambridge where the secret intelligence unit has its warren. As the drama starts, Jericho has been furloughed from Bletchley because of instability, but is brought back again because his eerily acute mind is needed even if it is haunted and unraveling. Subplots involve a forlorn love interest and the burrowings of a suspected mole, but the real story, and a good one, is whether Jericho can track Enigma through the deep space...
...author's edged, chill language fits his subject. Of tribal elders in a bar, he writes, "The three older men looked like the frail members of a government in exile, deeply versed in the politics of failure." Of a newly alcoholic reporter who covers the killings, McNamee observes, "He had somehow acquired the psychic credentials of the drinker, the sad, proclaiming spirit." There is an eerie exactness in these passages that pins meaning to the wall with a knife blade. Now and then, as in his evocation of a mother's "low-keyed and costly cries of love," his reach...
Rushed from Wuhan Intermediate People's Court only a few hours after the verdict, Wu arrived in San Francisco about 8 p.m. Thursday and proceeded to his home in nearby Milpitas, California. There, looking frail, he spoke with a parade of reporters over the next few days. In an interview with TIME, he described the fierce gamesmanship between him and his captors. "I was in a small room, only 4 sq m [43 sq. ft.]. These young guards were with me all the time." To gain the tiniest measure of privacy, he shamed them into letting him close the door...
...wowser. And they escalate into feeling with I'll Be Seeing You. This gorgeous rendition works as a reminder of what the boys were fighting for, and what any struggle--war in the '40s, AIDS in the '90s--means to the combatants: pain and loss, and a sweet, frail hope...
...surname beginning with Mc-, but there aren't many films about Irish Americans. Really Irish ones, with the guilt and the corned beef and the weekly Mass and the guilt. Edward Burns--writer, director and co-star of The Brothers McMullen--means to fill that gap with this frail fable of three Long Island siblings (Burns, Jack Mulcahy, Mike McGlone) and their romantic angst. They talk, soulfully. They fret, winsomely. They annoy...