Word: pearls
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Seen from miles away, it looks like a giant pearl-gray dirigible hovering over the African bush. Up close, its true shape emerges: a sandy-beige concrete behemoth topped by a gargantuan dome and a copper cross that gleams in the relentless sun. Equally remarkable, the great basilica is built in post-Renaissance style and has two long arms formed by 128 massive Doric columns that reach out from the porch to envelop a 7.4-acre plaza paved with granite and marble. Has St. Peter's Basilica been magically transported from Rome to the heart of Africa? No, this...
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Kennan is imprisoned by the Nazis. Released, he goes on to serve in Portugal, London and then, as the war winds down, the Soviet Union. In the early days, the writer regards the country less as a diplomat than as a romantic novelist manque. Leningrad is "one of the most poignant communities of the world . . . I know that in this city, where I have never lived, there had nevertheless been deposited by some strange quirk of fate -- a previous life, perhaps? -- a portion of my own capacity to feel and to love...
...winds of war whip briskly through this novel of the Philippines just before and during the Japanese occupation. Ralph Graves, who knew the islands as the teenage stepson of the U.S. High Commissioner during 1939-41, re- creates the prewar colonial atmosphere, the swift arrival of the enemy after Pearl Harbor and the struggle to survive until General Douglas MacArthur's triumphant return. Graves, the last managing editor of the weekly LIFE and a retired editorial director of Time Inc., deploys a diverse cast of characters (American, Filipino and Japanese) whose fates are joined in a narrative that combines...
...that one begins to wish the hearings had been this way in real life. We are told that the actor Joseph Daly is playing Vice President Burden. But when he delivers lines, or rather Bushisms, like, "Major Battle helped lead his men in the attack in the mud at Pearl Harbor," we cannot help but wish our own administration were so eloquently incompetent. Actor Daniel von Bargen portrays Major Manley Battle, whose lines like "standing orders prevent me from flying on anything but a stealth bomber," even outdo the real-life performance of Lt. Col. Oliver North...
...plans. Likely to roil the waters further is an upcoming BBC documentary contending that Hirohito must have known of the 1937 rape of Nanking, in which Japanese troops butchered at least 20,000 Chinese, and that he knew at least a month beforehand of the plan to attack Pearl Harbor...