Word: shades
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...FEET OF THE COUNTRY by Nadine Gordimer (241 pp.; Simon & Schusfer; $3.50), contains two sorts of short stories, those that pack a punch and those that shade a nuance. The hard-hitting tales are about the tensions of race relations, a subject that a South African writer like 32-year-old Nadine Gordimer (The Lying Days) can no more evade than a tongue can skirt a newly empty tooth socket. Author Gordimer's tactic is to blanket both races in a fog of routinely benevolent relationships and then lift it suddenly, revealing the complacent whites standing on the edge...
During the Indo-Chinese war, when the countryside was invaded by African troops and by a Foreign Legion containing more Germans than French, the garrison towns were filled with a polychromic and polyglot collection of youngsters born of every shade of father. The Eurasian population quadrupled, and a new word had to be coined: Africasians. Many girls with catholic tastes produced several children of mixed blood-each one a different color. Simply by bringing her baby for a cursory examination, a Vietnamese mother could get a "technical certificate of white race" that entitled the youngster to free care and education...
...least of the three nations carved out of French IndoChina-lay in its habitual half-slumber beside the Mekong River. It was the Buddhist Lent in Laos. Temple gongs bonged in the viscous humidity; saffron-robed monks strutted about beneath gaudy parasols or sat cross-legged in the shade, puffing acrid French tobacco and sipping lemonade. Suddenly there was a stir. Official limousines swept out of the royal palace amid shrieking sirens and flapping royal banners (a three-headed elephant against a red background), bearing Prime Minister Prince Souvanna Phouma to the airport to meet his half brother Prince Souphanou...
...days without water. The medical explanation: she had been unconscious most of the time, and her metabolism had slowed down drastically. With her breathing volume reduced proportionately, she had lost little water in the form of vapor from her lungs. She had been incredibly fortunate in falling beneath the shade of both the body of the car and heavy oak scrub, and thundershowers conserved her body's water supply by cooling it and checking perspiration...
...long a human being can survive without water varies so much with conditions that doctors recognize no records. In Death Valley, with a hot, drying wind and no shade, survival might well be less than 48- hours. Jean Margetts' case, record or no, was a striking example of the human organism's innate will to live...