Word: pit
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Alameda County district attorney, and later as state attorney general, Warren was a zealous law-and-order prosecutor, but he also had a scrupulous regard for the rights of the prosecuted. "I never heard a jury bring in a verdict of guilty but that I felt sick at the pit of my stomach," he admitted...
Such exceptional figures remain one of the enigmas of civilization. Leaders, wrote Peyre, "are indeed mystery men born in paradise or some devil's pit." In his brilliant study of Gandhi, Erik Erikson detected a "shrewdness [that] seemed to join his capacity to focus on the infinite meaning in finite things?a trait which is often associated with the attribution of sainthood." The rule that great leaders are summoned forth by great issues can be persuasively argued from, say, the Churchillian example?a brilliant, irascible aristocrat who was settling into a relatively unsuccessful old age when the war called...
Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture is a medley of the sounds of war. Cannons roar, bells chime, whistles and trumpets pierce the muffled drumbeat. Seeking superrealism in his interpretation, Atlanta Symphony Conductor Robert Shaw installed 16 electronically controlled explosive devices to simulate cannons in the pit. Last week, before a crowd of 1,500, he pressed a button on the conductor's stand on cue, and a smoky, skull-splitting blast filled the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center. That triggered a smoke-sensitive automatic fire alarm. In minutes, 25 eager firemen charged into the auditorium, axes and hoses...
...climbed Avital, one of three hills west of Quneitra, and looked across the flat plain that is Syria. It was easy to feel in the pit of your stomach why the hills mean so much to the Israelis. They command the entire plain. Suddenly, as if to confirm our musings, there were bursts of dirty smoke followed by bangs. The Syrian guns were at work, and the Israelis fired back. "It is an artillery war," explained an Israeli colonel...
EARLY IN John R. Coleman's working-class sojourn, his boss sends him off to deepen a cylindrical hole to make way for a standpipe. Coleman dutifully shuffles off, squeezes his frame down into the muddy pit, and with cramped movements heaves irregular clods back up towards the light. Ill-aimed shovel-loads occasionally fall back on him, but Coleman admits to rather liking the task. And just a few feet away, he notes, another submerged laborer toils in another clammy shaft...