Word: glassing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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During the four days of meetings in the Kremlin's steel-and-glass Palace of Congresses, delegates are to debate the future of Gorbachev's policies and, hence, perhaps of the General Secretary himself. The widespread expectation is that the conference will be far livelier than the set-piece meetings typical of East bloc politics. That prediction is buttressed by the presence among the delegations of fiery and independent-minded public figures. These include Boris Yeltsin, whom Gorbachev ousted late last year as Moscow party leader, apparently for being a bit too outspoken in favor of perestroika. Yeltsin was nevertheless...
...viewers knew her as the glamorous and authoritative NBC News anchor who was a role model for scores of aspiring women journalists. To her colleagues on the set, however, she was an anorexic, acne-scarred prima donna who would throw tantrums over the slightest inconvenience or reject a glass of water because it was too warm. And to those who claimed to know her best, she was a vivacious and vulnerable woman who became so debilitated by insecurity and drug abuse that she could barely function without a nursemaid. When Savitch's end finally came in a freak car accident...
...inheritance of more than (pounds)10,000 and the freedom to move to the colonial metropolis of Sydney, where she buys one of the first things she sees, the Prince Rupert's Glassworks. Lucinda's purchase is not entirely impulsive; she has already come under the spell of glass, with the conviction "that it is invisible, solid, in short, a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a material as any to build a life from." The unconventional young factory owner soon finds another obsession in the freewheeling world of Sydney: the joy of playing cards in particular and of gambling...
Carey's next trick is to bring these two similarly addicted but far-flung young people together. Lucinda journeys to London, where she consults with the designer of the Crystal Palace, the glass-and-iron housing for the famed Exhibition of 1851, about new directions her factory should take. Oscar, meanwhile, successfully out of Oxford and teaching school, has begun to feel that his method of raising money, while not in itself sinful, has inspired unholy passions in his soul. He longs, in short, to bet on everything. So, on the toss of a coin, he decides that...
...which may be either the arrival of civilization in a barbarous land or the destruction of an Edenic world by pompous, ignorant invaders. Like the best fiction, Oscar and Lucinda does not require a choice between its alternative visions. It offers instead an enchanting contradiction, a mirror and a glass, a joyous reflection of how much and how little mere mortals are ever allowed...