Word: hairbreadths
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Breaking into Prison. Life in Ecuador for Nate Saint, his trained-nurse wife Marjorie, and their three children was a story of emergencies and hardships that would pale the most jazzed-up TV script. Nate wrote of hairbreadth landings on narrow jungle airstrips that were "like parking a car at 70 miles an hour." Nate's "parish" covered a growing number of Protestant mission stations in eastern Ecuador. "It is our task," he wrote, "to lift these missionaries up to where five minutes in a plane equals 24 hours on foot . . . It's a matter of gaining precious...
...human back is stronger than the oppressor's whip. Surviving the siege of Drogheda-during which his wife is murdered and one child struck dumb-stubborn Dominick dodges his way through sacked and smoking Ireland accompanied by a saintly priest, helped by Irish guerrillas and making the customary hairbreadth escapes from gun and gallows. Author Macken brings such sweeping lyricism to this flight as to make it seem that plucky Dominick is battling his way the length of Siberia instead of the mere 100 miles from Drogheda to Galway...
...Never since Queen Victoria came to the throne more than a century ago," whooped London's Sunday Express, "has Britain been so buoyant, so prosperous." Britain's export boom broke new records in May, and came within a hairbreadth of bringing the long-coveted balance of trade. Last week the government announced that May exports reached an all-time peak of $866,300,000, leaving a trade gap of only $4,200,000, the lowest recorded since the government began keeping figures in the mid-19th century...
...launch looked good. But lack of further reports made veteran "birdwatchers" sense that something had gone slightly wrong. Later that night came confirmation : Dr. Wernher von Braun, the Army's top space man, admitted that Juno II had missed perfection by a thin but sufficient hairbreadth. It was still climbing, but not climbing fast enough to get near the moon...
...week before, the Navy had babied its slender satellite-laden Vanguard. Day after day the tension on the Cape had tightened as the Vanguard countdown crept steadily toward zero: once within nine minutes of launching, once again within 4½ minutes, again to 22 seconds-even to a hairbreadth 14 seconds. Each time the launching was scrubbed. And at length, the red-eyed, nerve-racked Navymen found a small propellant leak in the rocket's second stage. It was during the Vanguard trials that the Army moved its shrouded bird from a hangar to its launching pad and began...