Word: scours
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...disappear, not overnight but in the course of a hundred tuna casseroles served every Friday. No one is immune from dissatisfaction and its companion, desire, which can be tamped down but comes back unannounced. "You might find it when you slipped your hand into a rubber glove to scour the kitchen sink, or in the wedges of pears sliced onto a plate for a baby's lunch." It hits Nora's neighbor Donna Durgin one day when she is "wounded by the kindness" of the Sears repairman, who doesn't charge her for fixing the washer because he can tell...
...nonsense historian, Pitts does not merely scour written records but gets out and prowls city streets and country lanes for gems of the nation's "built history." And she is not averse to a touch of cloak-and-dagger. In 1976 she learned that the Chrysler Building in New York City was going into receivership and the owners wanted to raze it. She rushed to the city and slipped unobserved into the skyscraper. After a top-to-bottom tour, she saved the art deco masterpiece...
...diversity of the Amazon is more than just good material for TV specials. The rain forest is a virtually untapped storehouse of evolutionary achievement that will prove increasingly valuable to mankind as it yields its secrets. Agronomists see the forest as a cornucopia of undiscovered food sources, and chemists scour the flora and fauna for compounds with seemingly magical properties. For instance, the piquia tree produces a compound that appears to be toxic to leaf-cutter ants, which cause millions of dollars of damage each year to South American agriculture. Such chemicals promise attractive alternatives to dangerous synthetic pesticides. Other...
...handle the cleanup, Exxon has deployed an army of 10,500 workers and a flotilla of vessels. Some 3,000 beach cleaners wield high-pressure hoses in twelve-hour shifts to scour the crude from rocky shorelines. The task must be repeated often because tides wash the oil back onto beaches that have just been cleaned...
...become obsessive, which both accounts for the book's repetetiveness and goes a long way toward explaining its strengths. The book is spectacularly well-documented, with almost every sentence of the text scrupulously foot-noted. And anyone with more than a passing interest in the Mafia will want to scour Scheim's bibliography, which includes a vast range of writings about La Cosa Nostra, an organization that guards its secrets with deadly jealousy...