Word: rare
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...think I'm a dope fiend." Dillon has mastered the nurturing mother figure and Torn, perhaps the most flexible film actor around, fully mines this caricature of unprincipled greed. The rest of the cast seems to be a merry bunch of natural role-players and con men; the rare awkward line is pardonable...
Hersey does not drum up any pious conclusions about the saintliness of humble work. There are some obvious parallels between American evangelism and the politics of Manifest Destiny. With some skillful prodding, the documents and , memories he has rescued from obscurity speak for themselves. Treadup's disillusionment achieves a rare authenticity because it is earned on every page. And that makes Hersey's slow book to China worth every word...
...Luis, a Nobel-prizewinning physicist also at the University of California, who had the clay analyzed. To everybody's surprise, it turned out to be 30 times as rich in iridium as normal rocks. The Berkeley team knew of only a few places where such high concentrations of the rare element might occur: in the earth's core, perhaps 2,000 miles belowground; in extraterrestrial objects like asteroids (or their fragments, meteors) and comets; or in the cosmic dust drifting to earth from a nearby supernova (exploding star). The core material seemed too deep to come to the surface...
...revolution began with an unassuming element known as iridium, a rare and hard silvery-white metal related to platinum and gold. In the spring of 1977, Geologist Walter Alvarez of the University of California, Berkeley, was carefully chiseling through the rocks outside Gubbio, a medieval Italian town halfway between Florence and Rome, seeking clues to continental drift. Gubbio has long been an appealing site to geologists and paleontologists because its rocks provide a complete geological record of the critical boundary line between the end of the Cretaceous period, when the dinosaurs disappeared, and the Tertiary period, which followed...
...sense of the masterpiece (and of the skills that underlie its production) that has been imperiled by post-Tut museum hype. But of those 75 loans at the Morgan, perhaps 40 really are masterpieces in their genre, and the rest are of unassailably high quality. It is rare to see such a concentrated show...