Word: ransack
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Director Tim Burton (Pee-Wee's Big Adventure) has some poignant points to make about, well, life: that the dead must teach the living to savor it. Mostly, though, he wants to give good fun, to turn Winter River into West Eastwick, to ransack pop culture for references to everything from Topper to Tiny Alice. And to give Michael Keaton the chance to run productively wild. Keaton's Beetlejuice is a deliciously loathsome creature, whether shouting insults, lunching on insects or, in the film's climactic wedding scene, pulling a ring off a severed, shriveled finger and muttering...
Ambition and false identity, suicide and posthumous fame: these are the ingredients of high romance, and it is no wonder that investigators periodically ransack the material of Chatterton's brief career. The latest is Briton Peter Ackroyd, 38, biographer of T.S. Eliot and a novelist who specializes in the blending of history and imagination. In Hawksmoor he shuttled between the 18th century and the present. Chatterton ventures deeper ! into the time warp. It unfolds in contemporary England, concludes in the late 1700s and dallies in the Victorian epoch when an artist named Henry Wallis painted a dramatic portrait...
...even on Fridays, the streets of Port-au-Prince are empty. That is when the shooting begins. In the fancy neighborhoods on the hill and in the slums down by the water, armed men, often in uniform, sometimes in civilian clothes, break into houses, beat the residents, ransack the premises. They steal whatever suits them. No one really knows who they are, what they are looking for. But almost every morning, someone finds a fresh body lying on the street, a bullet through the head. The violence is making everyone wary of men in olive green...
...George Bernard Shaw was right when he said that confusing them had done "more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error." Dinesen adds, "Even these old champions of marriage, who think they are on secure moral ground, must, if they would for once ransack their own hearts and brains, admit that they are confusing the eternal rights that work for the benefit of humanity with their own personal taste -- a confusion that is still to be found even in the most honorable people . . ." The subject is likely to be debated as long as there...
...have gone 12,000 miles away to Australia. In 1981, seven years after Truda surfaced, he receives a phone call. The speaker is a woman named Margaret, who informs him that his mother is dead. She is, it turns out, Leitch's elusive sister. The siblings meet, joyously ransack memories and make the most astonishing discovery of all: there is yet a younger sister, Linda Elizabeth. She has been adopted, but she is untraceable. It is for her that Family Secrets is written, in the hope that she too will answer the call of the blood and complete the outline...