Word: modestly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Other scientists call Mullis a genius, but he offers a more modest explanation for his endless creativity: a fervent desire to avoid drudgery and have more time to play. As a boy in South Carolina, he transformed parts from the family washing machine into an automatic door opener so that he could let the dog out each morning without leaving his bed. As an adult, he invented a system to dim lights simply by thinking erotic thoughts. Even PCR was an attempt to devise a less laborious way of copying DNA than the method used by living cells. "When...
Part of what makes any fiction fun is the inversion of expectations. Kramer, the ruling white, is the team's iconoclast, full of scorn for procedure and authority. He is expedient, intemperate, womanizing and often drunk. Zondi, the oppressed black who for reasons of race earns a modest fraction of his partner's pay, is a convent-educated conformist. By the chronological end of the series he is a dutiful husband, attentive father and slightly stodgy bourgeois citizen. Each is responding to his social position: white Kramer can afford the luxury of defiance, but black Zondi cannot...
Take the current year, for example. Shannon's Deal, the Sayles-conceived television series about a former big-shot lawyer and high-stakes gambler trying to start his life over, completed its second season on NBC. Though its modest ratings were not enough to get it renewed for next fall, it won critical hosannas and enjoyed a strong cult following. Los Gusanos, his novel chronicling decades of personal and political intrigues in Miami's Cuban-exile community, came out in June to warm reviews. City of Hope, his movie about race and politics in a decaying industrial town...
...HarperCollins publish Los Gusanos without making any editorial changes -- Sayles is decidedly restrained in his personal life. "If you keep your nut low, you don't end up in a situation where you have to take any job," he explains. Thus Sayles and Renzi split their time between a modest brick row house in Hoboken, N.J., and a farm in upstate New York, both of which they share with friends. Neither has a taste for fancy clothes, expensive cars or other such trappings of success. In fact, Sayles regularly travels to New York City and back by bus, often writing...
...majority of Protestant congregations are not huge, expanding or glamorous, and tens of millions of U.S. believers are content with their more traditional and modest surroundings. Still, the superchurches have come to represent something new and powerful in most metropolitan areas. Calvary Chapel has even cloned itself, creating 370 daughter congregations across the U.S. Experts expect to see more of these Christian emporiums -- and a consequent permanent alteration in the ecology of American Protestantism...