Word: personal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...eras: the sheltered, made-to-order past versus the open, anything-goes present. Meyer makes good use of the city, staging a riveting chase over San Francisco's split-level belvederes and sky-ways. Not that Wells spends all his time chasing Stevenson. Romance blooms in the person of Amy, an aggressive bank-executive who takes him to lunch, to the movies, and to her apartment, where Wells succumbs to her charms after a feeble struggle--"I don't want to compromise you," he worries. Ironically, this self-described "twentieth-century woman" becomes the classic damsel in distress when Stevenson...
...fire captain brings out the water cannon, but there isn't enough pressure for it to be really effective. People get wet, one person gets flipped, and the skirmishes continue, so the police come out from behind the fence, and now what do you do? You can't rush by policemen, you just don't do that, and besides, would it be non-violent? Would everybody follow? So you retreat to a high spot and wait for the tide to come in while you hold some meetings...
...will not rest. "If being in love is to be suddenly united with the most unruly, the most outrageously alive part of yourself," he records in the first-person narrative, "this state of piercing consciousness did not subside in me, as I've learned it does in others, after a time. If my mind could have made a sound, it would have burst a row of wineglasses. I saw coincidences everywhere; meanings darted and danced like overheated molecules." Spencer's tensely energetic prose catches perfectly the lyricism and bombast of single-minded passion. It also registers some sweet...
...lingered: Was the leaking truly dangerous? Though radioactive, tritium is a hydrogen isotope emitting only low-energy beta particles that cannot penetrate uncut skin. If ingested, tritium may mix with body chemicals, but no biological damage has ever been proven. That ambiguity did not trouble state officials. "If a person breathes in tritium, it doesn't have to be strong to do harm," contends Ken Geiser, acting director of the Arizona atomic energy commission...
...identified with the "hard," I with the "softer" position. I did not indicate to any journalist that I had opposed the decision to use B-52s. But I also did little to dampen the speculation, partly out of a not very heroic desire to deflect the assault from my person. Some journalists may have mistaken my genuine depression about the seeming collapse of the peace efforts for a moral disagreement. Though I acted mainly by omission and partly through emotional exhaustion, it is one of the episodes of my public life in which I take no great pride...