Word: jolts
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Elmore Leonard doesn't spend a lot of effort word-painting backgrounds for his hard-guy capers. You know you're in Detroit or Miami or Hollywood because one of Leonard's sterling villains or slightly bent heroes tells you so. It's a jolt, nevertheless, to find that his latest thriller, Cuba Libre (Delacorte; 343 pages; $23.95), steams into Havana harbor on its first page, and that the shattered mast visible above the water is that of the U.S. battleship Maine, sunk three days earlier...
Benfey often dives so deep into such detail that the reappearance of Degas is a jolt: Degas, again? The cogent explanations of Degas' paintings interspersed through the text transcend this discontinuity. New Criticism be damned, Benfey glories in tying the fiction of Cable and Chopin and the art of Degas to their personal lives. Whether connecting Degas' cousins to various figures in his paintings or noting how Degas' artistic preoccupation with the unfamiliar presence of African-Americans seeped into his work, Benfey perceptively joins life...
...came the Asian Miracle, as booming Pacific Rim countries showed the rest of the world how to grow. Now comes the Asian Meltdown, as turmoil across the region shakes markets from Hong Kong to Wall Street. Last week it was Japan and South Korea that gave the world a jolt. No sooner had rumors of a possible South Korean collapse swept out of Seoul than the Japanese yen and the Tokyo stock market plunged to their lowest levels in two years. Across the Pacific, the ill winds from Asia blew the Dow Jones industrial average into a 157-point drop...
...summer, as lawyers working for Woodward did extensive tests on blood and tissue samples from Matthew Eappen and re-examined X rays and photographs of the damaged skull, an alternative hypothesis began to emerge: that the baby had been suffering from a fractured skull for some weeks and a jolt was enough to restart the bleeding that finally killed him. Evidence of a three-week-old fracture of the wrist as well as signs of apparent healing of the skull fracture appeared to support the scenario. The argument seemed so compelling that most observers thought the medical testimony...
...mesmerizing pair of panics--the headlong retreat on Monday followed by a buying frenzy the next day--is causing policymakers, corporations and investors to make an abrupt re-evaluation of the economy and the stock market in the face of an unexpected jolt from the Far East. If the market is the sum of all investors' knowledge at any given moment, as many theorists argue, then what on earth is this barking dog trying to tell...