Word: plumb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...quickly and, it was thought, painlessly. It seemed, in any case, up to date, civilized. (This progressive image is somewhat at odds with the testimony of Willie Francis, 17, who survived a sublethal shock by Louisiana's portable apparatus in 1946. Francis said the experience was in all "plumb miserable." His mouth tasted "like cold peanut butter," and he saw "little blue and pink and green speckles." Added Francis: "I felt a burning in my head and my left leg, and I jumped against the straps." A year later, back in the chair, he was successfully executed...
...sensitivity toward local cultures has led even conservative Protestants to treat tribal religion with respect. Missionaries try to banish belief in, and fear of, evil spirits; yet they also plumb the animist religions for concepts of eternal life or of a remote "high god" or primordial creator that might be used to inspire belief in the one God of the Bible. After all, the missionaries point out, Christmas was originally a pagan rite that ancient preachers turned to good advantage...
...Eleanor in the White House had become a benison. She gave hope to the desperate and defeated, seeking out the underdog and the eccentric . . . It was as if she engaged in a dialogue that was always invested with love. . . Relationships enabled her to remain human and to plumb depths of feeling from which she had long been absent. She was grateful and did not care what the papers wrote...
...that case, Butterfield's book is an enormous scroll, a teeming, informative landscape of scurrying figures. Bernstein paints with a more expressive, delicate brush. His art is philosophical and impressionistic, elegant and in some ways more moving. Where Butterfield deals mostly with urban China, Bernstein attempts to plumb the interior hinterland, the very heart of China. Together, these complementary volumes reveal the China of dust and sweat-the China of experience rather than imagination. They create a portrait of a society caught between two worlds one dead and the other powerless to be born...
...tools of technology are brought into the effort to see around the distant bend in the river. Thus planning has grown into a full-fledged industry in the 20th century. The trend is striking, but even more impressive is how little mankind has progressed LA its efforts to plumb the future since those days of prophetic dreams...