Word: perilousness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...photograph the tribesmen, angering the actors-for-a-day and delaying production. Rather than deploy a minion to settle the matter, Halmi approached the bus in his Hummer, "to make like Arnold Schwarzenegger," he gleefully explains, and proceeded to bluff the sightseers into thinking they were courting unspeakable peril if they didn't make peace with the natives. Goodwill could be rendered quickly, Halmi decreed, if the group could scare up some cash. Within a few moments, the tourists turned over to the Masai the $150 amalgam of their pocket money...
...past thousand years shows that mass psychology--if not events themselves--tends to behave in predictable ways when multiple zeros loom on the calendar. So if not plagued by incipient hype-induced ennui, how then should we be feeling as the 20th century winds down? "Convinced of exhaustion, extreme peril, exorbitant risk, explosive transformation." This is historian Hillel Schwartz's description of the fin-de-siecle mind-set in his definitive book Century's End. Schwartz was writing in 1988 and looking forward to a bang-up final decade. Indeed, the 1990s got off to a respectable fin-de-siecle...
...There is an inner logic to these sects and groups, we ignore it at the peril of our society," Gallagher said...
...Odor of menace" is an apt description of Stone's fictional atmospherics. His people either find themselves in, or get themselves into, situations of understated but hair-raising peril. In Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta, two druggy friends of an equally druggy American poet living in Mexico want to take him to see a nearby volcano. "The way," the poet is told once the trip has begun, "is to go up the mountain and make it all complete." In Helping, a man sober for 18 months starts drinking again. He tells his distraught wife that "this drink...
...plus a previously unpublished novella that gives the new volume its name. All seven pieces demonstrate, in concentrated form, the qualities that make Stone?s novels so harrowing, exhilarating and impossible to forget. His people either find themselves in, or get themselves into, situations of understated but hair-raising peril. In Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta, two druggy friends of an equally druggy American poet living in Mexico want to take him to see a nearby volcano. ?The way,? the poet is told once the trip has begun, ?is to go up the mountain and make it all complete...