Word: ordeal
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...shame that the press tried to make Solzhenitsyn a hero. Just as it glossed over his politics, it trivialized his ordeal. It reduced patriotism and exile to clumsy propaganda. The suicide of his friend, Yelizaveta Voronyanskaya, who told the KGB where to find the author's manuscripts, became a spy movie stereotype in which the Russian Nasties smashed the Closet Capitalists. In short, by blowing Solzhenitsyn beyond proportion and then dropping him from sight, the press created a hero who cannot inspire us and obscured the human being who might otherwise have moved...
...much the same form that the Hearst kidnapers have used to communicate with the world: a tape recording of the victim's voice. Speaking in clear and controlled tones, Murphy reported his abductor's motivation as the man, the only one who ever spoke during his long ordeal, had depicted it: "The A.R.A., as I understand it, feels that the American news media have been too leftist and too liberal. They intend to do something about that. That's the cause of my abduction." The kidnapers had also told him of a few other plans...
...Patricia's ordeal dragged through a second week, life at the Hearsts' $300,000 cream-colored stucco mansion in the San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough took on a grim order. The 15 rooms, many of them decorated with antiques from the fabled San Simeon mansion of Patricia's grandfather William Randolph Hearst, were filled with agonized friends and family. Among them were Patricia's four sisters and her fiance Stephen Weed, 26, who had been badly beaten by the kidnapers. FBI agents set up a command center in the library, which was crammed with six telephones on the chance that...
...ordeal that he and other inmates endured is not underplayed. A staff of 13 young, well-briefed Park Service rangers go deep into Rock lore: the men who came there, how they were treated and mistreated, how they lived, died and plotted escape. "Men were never sent directly to Alcatraz," Ranger Jane Rowley points out. "They always came as transfers and were considered the hardcore troublemakers, the incorrigibles...
...week of the year-Roha-tsu-came in December. The period of sleep was reduced to two hours, from midnight to 2 a.m. The monks meditated for 15 hours a day. Anyone who seemed inattentive was beaten with a long piece of board. Van de Wetering lasted out the ordeal, surprising himself and his superiors, but his account of it might be that of a survivor of some calamitous polar expedition...