Word: monumental
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Before leaving Malé, I walk clear around the island, stopping at the monument to the tetrapods, the name given to the interlocking concrete blocks that form the towering breakwaters protecting the city's most vulnerable flanks. Behind the breakwaters I hear the crash of invisible waves, in front the laughter of children swimming in the intensely blue water of a narrow canal. I wonder, What will the Maldives be like a couple of centuries from now? Will its corals have adapted to warmer conditions, as some think possible, or will they be forced to seek refuge in artificially maintained reefs...
...particularly ugly battle, in which hundreds of angry youths were involved, a black mob attacked and destroyed a group of buildings known as the Phoenix Center, founded by Mahatma Gandhi 80 years ago and now a monument to nonviolence. (Gandhi lived in South Africa from 1893 to 1915.) The episode began when hundreds of armed Indians assaulted 100 black refugees living in the center. Their motive: revenge for the previous looting and arson attacks by blacks on Indian townships...
...Germans. White House aides would not explain just why Bergen-Belsen was finally chosen. It is conveniently close to Frankfurt, its park-like setting is photogenic, and, since the camp was burned to the ground in 1945, there is little to remind visitors of its gruesome past except a monument...
Modern Los Alamos makes it easy to picture what the town looked like in 1943, when the physicists began to arrive and settle in. Like Hiroshima, Los Alamos lives in two eras simultaneously; a road sign near Bandelier National Monument park indicates six miles to the "Atomic City. Birthplace of the Atomic Age, scientific laboratory and museum, gas-food-lodging-golf course." The makeshift wooden apartments that once housed the physicists and their families are long down, as are the PX with its cathedral-like jukebox and the commissary and the walls of bed sheets drying...
...brutal murder, a man with the same name and same face has been elevated to a level of reverence that no other black person in American history has achieved. This other King’s birthday is a holiday, his name graces boulevards, and a honorary monument is being erected in Washington, D.C. In the meantime, the real, infinitely more complex King sits idly by, buried in the stagnant dust of college libraries lamenting his doppelganger’s decades-long turn in the spotlight...