Word: french
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...make a name for themselves these days. Both poles have been reached, the Atlantic has been crossed and recrossed, and the eagle has landed. So why not do it in a balloon? Well, what can you say about a pastime whose first passengers were, in an experiment by the French Montgolfier brothers in 1783, a duck, a rooster and a sheep? No wonder Piccard has a complex. "The way the public sees it is this," he explained before lift-off. "If we don't leave, we are idiots. If we do leave but don't succeed in our mission...
...portraits that, seen at the Paris Salon of 1884, caused a ruckus that precipitated Sargent's departure from France to England. One is his image of a pushy American social locomotive, Virginie Gautreau, all twisting, mannered pose and lunar, greenish-white skin, identified only as Madame X. The French critics and public hated it--and her. The other is a painting of a fashionable gynecologist named Dr. Samuel Pozzi, renowned in Paris for his exquisite tastes and the breadth of his affairs, including one with Mme. Gautreau. He rises before one's eyes in a flaring crimson robe with...
...good-bad cop dapperly in this good-middling drama set in Manhattan's Chinatown. He's the tough guy teaming with Mark Wahlberg's sweetly anguished type to battle a local triad. Foley (After Dark, My Sweet), who choreographs the snazziest New York car chase since The French Connection, specializes in close-up portraits of people sweating on the inside. But no matter how dank the moral dilemma, Chow will never break a sweat. In Hong Kong or New York, he's just too cool...
...powerful denunciation of ocean pollution, nuclear energy and overfishing. Though some ecologists lamented his late-blooming commitment to their cause, and professional scientists questioned the credentials of this self-taught oceanographer, their carping paled next to Cousteau's towering lifetime achievements--crowned by his induction into the prestigious French Academy...
When I was in France this summer, I learned more from perusing the bouquinistes (the used book sellers that line the Left Bank of the Seine) than I did during a whole semester of French literature...