Word: pearling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some Americans may think the MX missile is a batty idea, but it is the height of orthodoxy compared with a weapons scheme described in this month's American Heritage magazine. Just after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, a Pennsylvania dental surgeon named Lytle S. Adams hit upon the idea of arming bats with tiny incendiary bombs and letting them loose over Japan. The bomber bats would supposedly seek refuge in the eaves of Japanese houses, where their deadly cargoes-equipped with a 15-hr, timer-would explode and set off fires...
...acts as if he has been on a long business trip. This occurs at the end of Homesick Restaurant, and the reader is not surprised. The scene has had careful preparation, and Tull has been well defined by his absence. He is the black hole around which his wife Pearl and children Cody. Jenny and Ezra have had to exist. The novel opens with Pearl Tull, 85, dying and remembering. It then turns effortlessly into a series of chapters about her children that can almost be read as self-contained stories...
...family anger takes different forms. Pearl becomes a compulsive handyman. "All she wanted was to be allowed to get on with what mattered: calk the windows; weatherstrip the door. With tools she was her true self, capable and strong." Son Cody finds his outlet as a time-and-motion consultant. The richer he grows weeding out waste and inefficiency around the country, the clearer it becomes that time and motion are all he truly possesses. Daughter Jenny is a pediatrician who marries three times and buries herself in runny noses, diaper rashes and colic. There seems to be no line...
...keeping with the Reaganauts' generally demonological view of the Soviets, a key official of the present Administration, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Fred C. Ikle, does not rule out the possibility of a nuclear Pearl Harbor. Yet he can imagine such a thing only if future changes in the Soviet leadership produce a regime that is not as "cautious and conservative" as the current one. Meanwhile, he admits, "attention to the possibility of nuclear war by miscalculation is at least as important as to deliberate attack...
Since the Student Assembly sponsored the Poussett-Dart Band in the spring of 1980, these have been no other major rocks concerts at Harvard, Pearl said yesterday. She added that because of the Human's popularity, the planned concern should almost certainly sell...