Word: maze
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After navigating a traffic stop and a dizzying maze of barricades and consulting a half-dozen burly but friendly security guards, I finally found my way to the press tent at the foot of the red carpet to pick up my credential. The staffer begrudgingly handed it over; I don’t think she was expecting any profusely sweating eighteen-year-olds...
This is Andrew Field's third crack at the literary and biographical puzzle that was Vladimir Nabokov. The first, Nabokov: His Life in Art (1967), demonstrated the scholar's grasp of the great man's novels, stories and poems. It was a valuable guide through an intimidating maze of themes and plots; its thoroughness made it a high form of flattery. Field's credo, that a writer's "truest and most palpable biography" is his work, rang with disarming idealism. Nabokov must have been impressed and relieved; his disdain for the genre he defined as "psychoplagiarism" was well known...
...bring Dracula back to life after years of Count Chocula--cartoon clichés have sucked all the scariness out of him? Take him back to his roots. In The Historian, a humble academic and his child become caught up in a maze of mysterious documents that lead them to the original Dracula. Stuffed with rich, incense-laden cultural history and travelogue, The Historian is a smart, bibliophilic mystery in the same vein (sorry) as A.S. Byatt's Possession--but without all that poetry. --Lev Grossman
...throne room of Jerusalem's Greek Orthodox Patriarch in the Old City's Christian Quarter is at the heart of a maze of tunnels, sandstone stairways, narrow passages and courtyards bursting with almond blossom. Each night at 10 p.m., in a practice that dates back centuries, the priests of the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulcher lock themselves into their ancient warren, shutting out the iniquitous world beyond their walls. Lately, though, they've concluded the biggest threat lies within - Patriarch Eirinaios I, who's at the center of a labyrinthine religious and legal scandal involving the alleged lease of Church...
...floodplains of Soc Trang province in Vietnam's Mekong Delta are a maze of rivers and canals dotted with villages so impoverished that local farmers earn less than $1 a day. It is not an obvious place to seek a fortune, but capitalism finds a way. Steering his ramshackle boat along the Ke Sat River, Nguyen Van Hon operates a floating sundries distributorship. The wooden hold of his boat is heavy with boxes containing small bars of Lifebuoy soap and single-use sachets of Sunsilk shampoo, which he sells to riverside shopkeepers for as little as 2.5? each...