Word: perilous
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...switch has already been made, puts the original back in place and grabs the copy. Suddenly . . . but there's no tension, no believability, no sense that Baghdad's streets sound or feel or smell different from those of Paris or Geneva, or that a man and a woman in peril might react in different ways. This sort of frequent-flyer spy story depends on texture, and there's not much offered. Archer, who lacks the talent to get by with less than his best, writes like a man with his mind on an important lunch date...
...leaders on the world stage? Largely it is because of the absence of grand challenges, or at least of the clear good-vs.-evil challenges that can rally a people and call forth bold leadership. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were 20th century archetypes of the crisis leader. Mortal peril and powerful enemies can force leadership on ordinary men -- Harry Truman, for example. So can wrenching historic changes, like the dramatic endgame of the cold war, which cast players such as Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev and Walesa in historic roles...
...latest action epic of his film hero, Jack Slater (Schwarzenegger). "We're perfect buddy-movie material," the boy tells his reluctant new partner. "I'll teach you to be voluble. You'll teach me to be brave." Having seen part of the picture, Danny knows that Jack is in peril from a bull's-eye assassin (Charles Dance). There's a lot that Jack, poor simple muscle-bound dear, doesn't know -- including that he's a fictional character. When he chases the assassin out of movieland into the "real" world, he finds that other rules apply. Heroes get hurt...
...villains of Raymond Bonner's confused rant about elephants in Africa are misguided animal-rights activists, well-born white conservationists and elephants. Elephants? Bonner's subtitle, Peril and Hope for Africa's Wildlife, constitutes false advertising since the book's sympathies lie with Africans who suffer at the hooves of elephants that trample crops, destroy property and kill natives. According to Bonner, elitist conservationists unleashed these malevolent beasts on hapless villagers when the World Wildlife Fund and the African Wildlife Foundation cynically pushed for an international ban on the sale of ivory in 1989 because it played well with sentimental...
Even though the researchers have not yet isolated the gene, they suspect that it represents an entirely new pathway to peril. In the past, most genes linked to cancer, including a few linked to colon cancer, have been genes that play a role in regulating cell division, in some cases stopping cell growth when DNA is damaged. When such genes are themselves deranged, genetic errors can rapidly accumulate. But the newly discovered defect is not in a damage- control gene. Instead, it seems to be a direct agent of damage that somehow unleashes wave upon wave of DNA mutations over...