Word: gist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Gist: Any man who boasts a troika of girlfriends five decades his junior, pops Viagra like Pez and considers smoking jackets formalwear is bound to be divisive. But whether you consider Hugh Hefner a smut-peddler or a "prophet of pop hedonism"-TIME's phrasing in 1967-you can't deny the guy his place in the American canon. And in Mr. Playboy, biographer Steven Watts argues that Hef's influence extends well beyond the bedroom. By framing sex as an All-American aspiration-as worthy a pursuit as good wine or flashy cars-the famous free-love evangelist scrambled...
...Gist:In 2002 Rice, the queen bat of vampire fiction, shed her fangs and began writing books (two so far) about the life of Jesus. This memoir is Rice's attempt to explain her return to Christianity, moving from the idyllic New Orleans of her 1940s childhood to the renunciation of her Catholic faith - indeed, of all faiths - during her student years and after in 1960s San Francisco. Rice's reminiscences about her ensuing atheist period and the success of her decidedly irreligious vampire novels are tinged with some sorrow; she moves earnestly on to the 90s, years in which...
...Gist...
...Gist: In October 1910, a bomb ripped apart the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times, killing 21. The paper, at the center of a "you must take sides" conflict between labor and capitalism (the broadsheet's owner, publisher and editor, Harrison Gray Otis, detested the former) quickly blamed union terrorists. Interweaving the tales of Billy Burns, a private detective known as the "American Sherlock Holmes," famed attorney Clarence Darrow, of Scopes Monkey Trial fame, and filmmaker D.W. Griffith, director of Birth of a Nation, Blum attempts to weave an early twentieth century murder mystery...
...Gist: By exploring the mysterious phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that is wiping out honey bees worldwide, Jacobsen lays out a case for why we need to care - and it has very little to do with honey. A spiritual successor to Rachel Carson's seminal eco-polemic Silent Spring, Fruitless Fall walks us through the various theories put forth as causes of CCD -genetically-modified crops, global warming, God's wrath, cellular phones, loss of habitat and a nicotine-like pesticide to name a few. Jacobsen concludes that a return to simpler times - for example, before honey bees were...