Word: paean
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...book The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama offered a paean to the glories of flying on private jets. He lovingly described his first trip on a Citation X: "The plane took off, its Rolls-Royce engines gripping the air the way a well-made sports car grips the road ... I could see how people might get used to this." The punch line of the story was that Obama's staff asked him to give up the practice, which was legal, because he was the Democrats' Senate point man on ethics reform. "It was the right thing...
...story charts Li's noble endeavors with uncritical adulation - from plugging shamelessly self-flattering quotes to the strange implication that B-movie plot themes can lay down a foundation for morality. Li's case would have been helped had he received a less frothy and dripping paean. Instead of pushing forward a more thoughtful agenda, TIME used its eloquence to further entrench the celebrity worship that plagues the international humanitarian scene. Jawahar Joshi, Patna, India...
...Lowdown:When a book opens with a paean to the wonderful smell of burning buffalo dung - "At times I've dipped my face into the smoke and picked up the odors of cinnamon and cloves, dried straw and pumpkins" - you know it's going to be a dirty read. But there's really no other way to talk about hunting, and Rinella's tale of tracking buffalo in Alaska is alluringly visceral in its description. His multichapter description of killing, skinning and chopping up a buffalo cow is alternately stomach-turning and riveting. It's easy to understand the allure...
With the finish line of a bruising, interminable presidential race in sight, there aren't too many things Republicans and Democrats still agree on. But cute - and wildly talented - kids are one of them, and the seventh-graders at Atlanta's Ron Clark Academy certainly qualify. Their paean to the political process, "You Can Vote However You Like," inspired by rapper T.I.'s hit "Whatever You Like," has swept across the Internet over the past few days, amassing nearly 300,000 hits on YouTube and booking them upcoming appearances on ABC's Good Morning America and BET's 106 & Park...
...Steven Millhauser? He is an American writer. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner. He is the author of a recent paean to the short story. Drawing an analogy to William Blake’s “world in a grain of sand,” he writes in a New York Times essay that “the short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there—right there, in the palm of its hand—lies the universe…In that single grain of sand lies the beach that...