Word: greatful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...daylight, the tinkling of silver bells and the aromatic incense of another age vanished like a mirage in the Kara Kum Desert. A Red flag flapped on the 203-foot-high summit of the Great Minaret, from which for centuries cruel khans and emirs had cast their enemies to their deaths. Over the main gate, in Russian and Uzbek, Maclean read the inscription: Town Soviet. Elsewhere he found decay and neglect. The miles of covered shops in Central Asia's most fabled bazaar had dwindled to a handful of grubby stalls, and only a few of the city...
...bone-dry as the Sahara, and interminable wastes of grassy steppes make it one of the earth's most inhospitable areas. But from this Eurasian heartland came Aryans to populate the West, and across its pink sands marched generations of world conquerors. In 329 B.C. Alexander the Great sacked Samarkand ("Place of Sugars"), a city already centuries old. Rebuilt, Samarkand became one of the central depots on the great Silk Road from Byzantium to China, and flourished as a brilliant seat of Arab civilization, only to be destroyed again by Genghis Khan. Near the end of the 13th century...
...trickiest and most disputed questions in the nebulous world of international law is legal jurisdiction in the air. If a Swiss citizen slips arsenic into his wife's martini on a British airliner flying from Frankfurt to Paris, which country should prosecute-Great Britain because the plane is British, France because the plane landed there after the crime, Switzerland since Swiss citizens were involved, or Germany in whose airspace the crime was committed...
...audience from the podium. But Bernstein, being Bernstein, wanted everyone to know the fine points of Charles Ives's 1908 The Unanswered Question, and with help from a translator gave a brief talk before leading his musicians through the intricate, dissonant piece. The effect was electric. So great was the applause that Bernstein played it again. He gave a second chat before playing Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, and still a third for the composer's Le Sacre du Printemps, explaining that it touched off a "musical revolution five years before your own revolution...
There was none of the improvised Dixieland so familiar to festivals; nor were there many personal appearances by such great solo showmen as "Satchmo" Armstrong or Gene Krupa. Instead, classics-minded young jazzmen concentrated on the brassy new progressive jazz and the slightly atonal West Coast styles, and played their well-rehearsed arrangements with the cool elegance of conservatory students. Even Stan Kenton's 18-piece (including bongo drums) orchestra had its own smooth brand of progressive beat. But the real stars of the festival were the small, intimate combos that played jazz with a new maturity and subtlety...