Word: overwhelmer
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Still, Orwell never allowed this innate pessimism to overwhelm his talent or his energies. With Europe flaring into war, he took time from his political comments to write essays on Charles Dickens, Henry Miller and the literary and social merits of English boys' magazines. Oddly, these are the pieces that have aged the least. It is as if survival depended on the small things, like childhood pleasures, and not the large things, like...
...FRENCH REVOLUTION is a subject whose innumerable contradictory messages ultimately overwhelm one another. Like the chemical elements in the hands of a skilled chemist, events of the years 1789-1801 can be combined in different ways to create wholly distinct products. A modern day radical could discern in the fall of Maximillien Robespierre the lesson that only unwavering idealism and relentless persecution of reaction can sustain a revolution; a moderate could claim that only the tempering of justice with mercy can save a regime from overthrow...
There are individual dreams and collective dreams. Charles Lindbergh's trajectory across the Atlantic in 1927 was a vivid feat of individualism. He became one of the last romantic heroes. He brilliantly employed the technology of flight in its primitive stage, before technology seemed to overwhelm the individual. If the American space program produced a triumph of teamwork in an age when hundreds of human brains were needed to collaborate, like microchips, in the mastery of so much detail, Lindbergh's flight represented a peculiarly, almost wistfully, American way of doing things. It was a lonely achievement...
...talkies are burlesqued by horn sounds that make the actors seem to be talking with their mouths full of mush. Also there is an episode where Mr. Chaplin swallows a whistle. Each time he coughs he whistles and he cannot stop coughing. Taxis hurry up and stop, dogs overwhelm him. Hollywood also grew hysterical during a prizefight in which Charlie survives two rounds by dodging so briskly that the referee is always between him and his murderous opponent...
...quick six-day tour of the province, for an oldtimer, is a delight. The small towns throb again, their booths full of sweets, cookies, housewares, clothes, textiles, flower pots and flowers. In big cities like Chengdu and Chongqing, the huge food markets overwhelm the eye with food that can be bought without coupons. Hogs come squealing to market in wheelbarrows, on tractors, even lashed to the backs of bicycles, then reappear in the markets as huge slabs of pink-and-white pork. Peasants bring in their wives' squawking chickens, eight to a basket. Down the market lanes peasants sell geese...