Word: raptly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...political figures have been speculating somberly about the catastrophes that could befall the Soviet Union if perestroika falls apart. Last September, for example, political oppositionist Boris Yeltsin, a former Moscow party boss, repeatedly warned of an impending disaster. "We are on the edge of an abyss," Yeltsin told a rapt audience at New York's Council on Foreign Relations. Yeltsin gave Gorbachev until next fall to produce results. Others have warned of an actual civil war by then...
...agonize over the career path not chosen, the debt too steep, the woman so close but just beyond their reach. For many, though, a dream of athletic stardom is the one that got away. So they stick with baseball, living and dying with their team, analyzing stats with the rapt anguish of a rabbinical student cramming for a final. To their favorite players they are both sons and fathers -- part hero worshipers, part child psychologists. They become a collective, possessive lover of their idols. Baseball fever: boys catch it, men can't shake...
Ever since the fiasco first popped into the headlines in 1986, millions of Americans have awaited a full exposition of the Iran-contra affair. They whetted their palates with appetizers from the Tower commission and sat with rapt attention through 13 weeks of televised congressional hearings, confident they were experiencing only a first course of the full meal that would follow when special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh brought Lieut. Colonel Oliver North and three alleged co-conspirators to trial...
Inside a crowded courtroom in Jerusalem, a rapt audience sat hushed as the nation's highest judges wrestled with an explosive question: Is Rabbi Meir Kahane simply too fanatical to run in Israel's Nov. 1 election? Outside, dozens of the American-born rabbi's supporters bellowed their own verdict, waving banners emblazoned with Kahane's provocative trademark, a clenched fist. Starry-eyed disciples strained to touch the man who vows to expel every last Arab from both Israel and the occupied territories. Exclaimed one young follower: "Next month we shall decide once and for all how to deal with...
...concerns extend well beyond these. He is convinced that major league baseball plays a bardic, mythic role in American society; the long, recurring seasons are an ongoing epic, Homeric or Vergilian or Dantesque, a vital locus of rapt assembly where enduring values are enacted and passed on. "The game is such a wonderful mix between the individual and the community," he says. "The struggle between the pitcher and batter throws these two isolated competitors into lonely relief. But the purpose of that confrontation is for the team, the benefit of the larger group...