Word: reigns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...crystal totem at its center. The setting is "another world, another time, in the Age of Wonder." A war between the benevolent Mystics (who look like shaggy-dog anteaters) and the evil Skeksis (pustular vultures) has obliterated all but a few of each. Under the Skeksis' whimsically sadistic reign, virtually every member of the industrious elfin race of Gelflings has been slaughtered. Only two remain-Jen, a young male, and the girl Kira-to replace the crystal's missing shard and set the world aright again...
Will scores of the condemned die soon? Advocates on both sides of the issue mostly agree that no reign of terror is imminent; there might be several more executions next year but not several dozen. Notes Lawyer David Kendall, who represents death-row inmates: "People have said the floodgates would open every time we've had an execution, and they haven't yet." But as appeals are exhausted, a steady trickle may well begin...
...some policies that were reminiscent of the Stalin years. Arrests and deportations gradually extinguished the dissident movement. Some future historians may mark Brezhnev's expulsion in 1974 of Nobel-prize-winning Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn as one of the most significant events of the Soviet leader's long reign...
After his long reign, the Soviet Union was no longer a public desperado banging shoes to gain attention...
...many Americans and other Westerners, however, the Soviet accumulation of nuclear arms represents something far more menacing. The weapons proliferated so rapidly and so massively during the 18 years of Brezhnev's reign that they conveyed the impression of a juggernaut. American deployments during the same period, while formidable in their own right, tended to occur more in fits and starts...