Word: ghostly
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Ugandan health officials suspected, and tests in South Africa two weeks ago confirmed, that this ghost was real and goes by the name Ebola. A lethal virus first identified in northern Congo in 1976, Ebola attacks almost everything in the body except bone, destroying the immune system in fast-forward and causing organs to melt down, hemorrhage and then bleed out through the body's orifices. The period between infection and the onset of sickness is three to 14 days. Death follows within a fortnight. Ebola-Zaire, the first strain identified, kills 90% of those infected. The strain that...
...nearby town of Gulu, Owete was injected with the antimalarial chloroquine and sent home. "She didn't even last 24 hours," says Okot. "We didn't understand that someone could die that quickly. We began calling this thing gemo, which in [the local language] Luo is a type of ghost or evil spirit. No one knows about it, but it comes and takes you in the night...
...expertly impaled on Frank Rich's pen during his 1980-93 run as "the Butcher of Broadway" (a.k.a. the drama critic for the New York Times), there are, in his new memoir, a couple of bombshells: Rich has a heart, and that heart loves the theater passionately and needily. Ghost Light (Random House; 311 pages; $24.95) is really two memoirs. The first is about--surprise!--a troubled childhood. The second is a tender reminiscence of the American theater of the '50s and '60s. Where Ghost Light often excels is where the two meet: the critic's evolving personal relationship with...
There Rich glimpsed a life beyond his fractious home. Sneaking into a lonely, darkened Broadway theater, he saw the crew strike the set, leaving behind a naked light bulb on a tall pole--a "ghost light," meant to ward off spirits. That image--the idea of the theater as a welcoming place where the light never goes out--sparked in him "the fantasy that I might extract some glittering consolation prize for being different and alone." Rich became a theater geek nonpareil, an awkward Jewish kid who, making his Bar Mitzvah, recognized the designer of the temple's ark from...
...critic's craft. At The Music Man, Rich empathizes with the disillusioned, fatherless boy Winthrop: "'Hurry up and leave!' he yelled at the Music Man," he writes, "his sobs now more hurt than sad--another sound I recognized. He wanted the Music Man to stay and be his father." Ghost Light ends as Rich leaves home for college, but in this eloquent book, we already see him becoming a critic and art lover in the truest, deepest sense. In the process, he teaches us that you can't be a good butcher without loving the cooking...