Word: perfervid
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...future of nuclear power is an issue that bedevils America and excites the Soviet Union. While perfervid demonstrators, dallying bureaucrats and well-paid lawyers are holding back the development of U.S. atomic power, the U.S.S.R. is moving ahead rapidly with its own nuclear programs. TIME Correspondent Peter Staler recently spent two weeks visiting Soviet nuclear installations and filed this report...
...spark that ignites this particular witch trial lies in the perfervid erotic imagination of Sister Jeanne (Martha Henry), prioress of St. Ursula's Convent in the town of Loudun. She tells her confessor that in tormented night hours, she is forced to utter obscene words and participate in obscene acts. The nuns in her charge are similarly afflicted. In a fit of possession, with her strangulated sepulchral voice suggesting The Exorcist, Sister Jeanne reveals the devil inside -Grandier-a neighboring vicar whom she has never actually seen...
...fate of The Thorn Birds will certainly not hang on literary merit. With the broadest strokes and the most perfervid prose, the novel traces three generations of the Cleary family-from poverty in New Zealand to wealth in Australia to triumphs on the London stage and in the Vatican. None of the Clearys, however, is as interesting as Australia itself. McCullough knows how to stage convincing droughts, floods and fires. Even her descriptions of landscapes sometimes flare into life...
Within such brackets of past and future, the United States will celebrate its 200th anniversary this weekend-a culminating moment of raucous blowout compounded of Disneyland pageantry and kitsch, perfervid oratory, sentiment and sentimentality, dissent, 10,000 miles of bunting, phalanxes of politicians and majorettes in a din of John Philip Sousa brass, and tons of fireworks splashing in the dazzled night...
Jonathan's mother starts a perfervid affair with an American seaman, Jim (Kris Kristofferson), which her son also observes intently through his knothole. Jonathan liked Jim when they first met, thought him strong, worldly and commanding, but soon has a new viewpoint. Mom's sailor may have been fine on the ocean, where he was part of "the pure and perfect order of things," but away from his rightful place, he becomes an imperfect creature, a subject of jealousy and contempt who must be done away with. Jonathan consults the Chief, who had previously persuaded his minions...