Word: ordeal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...just suddenly realized that the blue patch at me feet was water coming in," recalls Simon Le Bon. So began the ordeal at sea that the lead singer of the rock band Duran Duran calls "the worst experience of my life." Le Bon, 26, was asleep in the cabin of his 77-ft., $1.8 million yacht Drum during the final leg of the international Admiral's Cup race about two miles off the coast of Cornwall last week when the keel snapped off and the craft capsized. The singer and five of the 24-man crew were trapped...
...essential intent was to minimize friction during passage through an often abrasive society. To be nice, by some gentile measure, was more than a question of etiquette. It was a "sacred canon," Silberman says. Service to that canon became, in the words of Sociologist John Murray Cuddihy, "the ordeal of civility." Of all the problems faced by Jews since their earliest days in America--and Silberman covers most of them--the endless struggle over identity seems most fraught with anguish. Early arrivals in the new country found a society more tolerant than it was to become after the Civil...
...getting tiddly on eggnogs when, without at first modulating her tone, Ana explains why she left Argentina so suddenly, without saying goodbye to anyone. It is a tale of midnight abduction, a blow to her head--and waking up naked, tied to a table prepared for torture. Her ordeal continued for 36 days and ultimately included rape. The world she has traveled since is not large enough to escape the memory of those agonies. And there will never be time enough to forget them...
...Arduousness follows, an endless subverbal sequence in which the hero trains in the vast primitive fastness of the Soviet wilderness, with only his own fighting spirit to sustain him as he chops wood, lifts rocks and runs up the highest mountain for a socko finish. Crosscut with this lonely ordeal are shots of Drago, who has an entire collective of helpers and all the latest electronic and chemical gizmos working on his muscle tone...
...Rusch, this is the sweet spot of the ordeal, the day she falls into the rhythm of the race and no longer feels as if she is playing catch-up with her teammates. "As the race gets longer, women tend to do better and better," she says. "I think that has a lot to do with body fat, since women, even athletic and fit women, have more stores to pull from. Guys have about 6% body fat, while women will carry about 12%." The calculus of human exertion, however, is working against all the contestants. Adventure racers typically burn...