Word: pickaxe
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Mandela's busy life at Victor Verster contrasts sharply with the years of hard labor he endured on Robben Island, a penal colony across from Cape Town Harbor where he was incarcerated for nearly two decades. For the first ten years he swung a pickax in a limestone quarry, breaking boulders into gravel. But the harsh punishment only strengthened his resolve, and he directed his anger into a crusade for better prison conditions. "To us," says Steve Tshwete, an A.N.C. guerrilla leader imprisoned for 15 years, "he represented the correctness of our cause and the inevitability of our victory...
With breathtaking speed, the hideous partition that split Berlin falls to the pickax of reforms inspired by Mikhail Gorbachev. As the city exults and the world ponders the consequences, one thing is certain: nothing will ever be quite the same again. -- Is one Germany better than two? -- An obituary for the Wall of Shame, where some 75 people yearning for freedom have perished...
...Tigers and Royals have sampled defeat, and the Padres have done more than that, only the Cubs have stood for disillusionment, and their first success in 39 years has wrought a national catharsis. For Cub fans actually from Chicago, where this way of strife is passed down like a pickax from father to son, it must be gently annoying to find so many noble sufferers going public, besides George Will and the other political columnists breaking out in their regular rash...
...spanking-clean hard hat, electric-blue jumpsuit and unblemished tennis sneakers, he looked more like a catalogue ad for blue-collar chic than a bona fide construction worker. But it turned out that Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, 51, swings a mean pickax. Reproved at a political meeting for junketing about the globe instead of minding the store at home, Young replied: "It would be nice to stay here and fill the potholes. If you find a pothole, see me. I'll fill it up myself." Naturally, the next day, Hizzoner's office received 60 calls. In four scheduled...
...Trotsky was killed with a pickax, you know. I imagine some day John Carpenter will make a movie of it." Emily Mann, the play's director, is alive to both the passion and the ambiguities in each man's argument and, by staging the piece at a ferocious pace, demonstrates that the drama of ideas can be the most exalted of blood sports...