Word: medusa
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...soul, that the problems of the world were intractable, that the future lying ahead was an ever darkening road. Worldwide famines and dire overpopulation loomed, people murdering for bowls of rice. Global pollution. The death of the rivers and oceans. The earth itself became the raft of the Medusa...
...first impression, in a roomful of them, is of wandering in an aquarium. Coral is everywhere: fans, rigid laces, spreading antlers, all speckled and inscribed with rainbow color. Growths push upward from the floor and terminate in mad displays of hair, Medusa-like tentacles and other scribbles. Though some sculptures seem to belong to the sea bottom, there are others that suggest the land-tropical nature, in its fleshy leafings and embowerings. The plants, or colonies, or whatever they are, ramify from narrow stems; sometimes they reverse the "normal" look of sculpture-well planted, firmly accommodating itself...
...Anatomy Lesson lambastes modern culture with the same venom and guilt as its predecessors, and Zuckerman continues to be tormented by the same medusa-like females, self-righteous Jews, and spiteful relatives that have historically oppressed him. Yet if the subjects of The Anatomy Lesson sound all too predictable, the tone of the novel is distinct...
...Lewis Thomas, 69, has built a successful second career by giving many laymen their first clear overview of the moral and even aesthetic problems that can be encountered in the laboratory. The bestselling essays in The Lives of a Cell and The Medusa and the Snail moved nimbly from the microscopic to the transcendental. Nucleoli revealed worlds of meaning; peptides hid oceans of being. Charmed by Thomas' low-key lyricism, the judges of the National Book Award granted the physician-researcher its prize for arts and letters in 1975. Somehow the doctor had put his pulse on the thumb...
...snake "as though human ... its gaping mouth clutching the breast that once fed me ... it then mingled the sweet milk with curds of blood." John Ruskin has a serpent nightmare: "It rose up like a Cobra-with horrible round eyes and had woman's, or at least Medusa's, breasts. [It] fastened on my neck." The origins of tabloid astrology can be traced to the predictions of Astrampsychus (circa A.D. 350): "Gladness of mind shows that you will live abroad"; and Napoleon 's Book of Fate (circa 1860): "For a young woman to dream that...