Word: hourglasses
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...brighter, smaller ring are surrounding the site of a supernova, an exploding star whose violent death was recorded by astronomers in 1987. For millenniums before the blast, Burrows and his colleagues believe, the terminally ill star had been gushing out great volumes of gas, which formed an hourglass-shape "bubble." (The bubble would ordinarily have been spherical, except that the gas around its equator was especially thick and slow-moving and thus stayed relatively close to the supernova.) Then, when the star blew up, the flash of light made the gas glow. Most of the bubble is shining too faintly...
...trail of amiable psychopath Joseph Cotten. Carey is perhaps most beloved by viewers of daytime television, where for three decades he played the perpetually understanding Dr. Tom Horton on nbc's Days of Our Lives -- and provided the show's trademark voice-over: "Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives...
...Alone," Merrill had written in the early poem "Hourglass," "one can but toy with imagery": maybe the thin narrative here, of Kimon and Seldon and Claude and mother and father and Robert and others, is Merrill's effort at a kind of writing more social, and more transparent, than the elaborated imagery of even his clearest verse. The new clarity of Merrill's prose, unfortunately, often sounds like this: "Yet I couldn't help noticing, alone with Freddy at his visit's end, how much more freely my tongue wagged and my mind worked than they did with Claude...
Ruth Rendell has enough talent for two people, so she also writes mysteries under the name of Barbara Vine. They usually concern a crime committed long ago; this time, Gallowglass (Harmony; 272 pages; $19.95) shifts from past to present, from first person to third, like sand in an hourglass. The kidnaping of an heiress was foiled years ago; now the same man tries to commit the same crime, this time with the aid of the naive narrator. An attempt is made to bribe the woman's bodyguard; when he refuses, the malefactors kidnap his young daughter with catastrophic results...