Word: overwhelmer
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Daniel Boorstin, Librarian of Congress and a Pulitzer prizewinner for his book The Americans: The Democratic Experience, says that life is "more graspable" in smaller places. He believes that the immense cities often overwhelm the people who grow up there, discouraging them before they reach the age of leadership. In smaller places, he reckons, hope, a certain confidence and an ability to cope are nurtured. Boorstin is intrigued at how some of the open-air, back-fence values of Editor William Allen White, the Emporia sage of the 1920s, have re-entered the national discussion and how the small-town...
Jimmy Buffett's contribution to the New Country has been a sophisticated rowdiness, a wallowing in the sound of words, a degree of self-parody, and a subtly vulgar description of place and time and living. Buffett's worst moments are his most sentimental, when strings overwhelm his plain acoustic and pedal steel guitars, when he talks about his grandfather and going home, and gets trapped in the old cliches. These moments are more numerous on Buffett's later albums--as he runs out of youthful exuberance, maybe--but he greases his way out of most of the beartraps with...
Horror, revulsion, panic overwhelm everyone who witnesses the climax of Jaws. Yet people have paid more than $150 million for the experience. Why? Why in a world menaced by drug epidemics, official corruption, political assassination, terrorist armies, atomic holocaust and pay toilets do human beings feel a longing to be scared out of their skins? What is this perverse allure of the horrible that in all ages and nations has made men sit at the feet of the taleteller who can summon adrenalin with shadow dangers...
Interestingly, that urge never seems to overwhelm people like Leonid Brezhnev, who keeps delaying his trip to the U.S. because we have not worked out anything new for him to negotiate on arms limitation. When he can make a deal, he will be on our doorstep...
That could almost serve as a motto of the Ford family's stay in the White House: when pomp threatens to overwhelm any proceeding, the Fords counter with their disarming lack of pretension. "I had never thought about being First Lady," says the President's wife. "So I decided-I'm just going to be Betty Bloomer Ford." She both has and hasn't, and that may be her chief charm and canniest success as First Lady. Not long ago, after the White House domestic staff had turned in for the night, Secretary of State Henry...