Word: odyssey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Arthur C. Clarke's sequel, 2010: Odyssey Two (Ballantine; $14.95), resumes the themes of his celebrated 2001, published 14 years ago. A joint Soviet-American expedition sets out to locate the spaceship Discovery and to examine the huge black monolith of 2001. The first part is easy; even Hal, the malevolent talking computer, which had to be electronically lobotomized in 2001, is reparable. But the crew can only watch as powers beyond its understanding transform Jupiter, which astronomers call "the star that failed," from an enormous sphere of gases into a small glowing sun capable of sustaining life...
...first name differently but a conventional 34-year-old who lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side in middle-class complacency. He takes the palmist literally. Informing his wife that she is no longer spiritually or sexually attractive to him, he abruptly leaves home. Thus begins an odyssey into the sordid inferno of an urban sub-world...
...classics are much more than just well-written literature: "If you focus in on Homeric poetry, one of the oldest forms of poetry in Greece, what you really have is the survival of the fittest, to put it cruelly. And you ask yourself, why did the Illiad and the Odyssey survive, and why did they become the epic for the Greek city-states. What was in them that made them such a universal expression of what it means to be Greek as opposed to barbarian. They are an expression of what it means to be educated, what it means...
...find the Arctic Ocean more frightening than any other region I have traveled through, certainly more hostile than Antarctica." In spite of their success, neither Fiennes nor Burton is anxious to set out again for parts unknown any time soon. "This three-year odyssey has exorcised my wanderlust with a vengeance," said Fiennes. "I have had more than enough." The Transglobe's return to England capped a weekend marked by maritime achievement. Bill Dunlop, 41, a former truck driver from Maine, sailed his 9-ft. ⅞-in. sailboat, Wind's Will, into Falmouth after a 78-day voyage...
...spent nearly half his life have provided various punishments, they have also given him a context for looking into his own mind. Since what frightens him about his mind was nurtured in prison, the process of self-examination is as circular and enclosed as Sy's upstate odyssey. Such nonprogress may be typical of a great many prisoners, but as one discovers in a place like Attica, no inmate is typical. All the instruments of uniformity in a prison-the architecture, the outfits, the language and routine-merely emphasize the fact that here, as elsewhere, every cell contains...