Word: shrill
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...clangor of bells from Christian churches. Auto horns, the plaintive cries of peddlers, and the bray of donkeys blend with the screech of jet planes. With evening comes the sound of 64 nightclubs, the throb of motorboats carrying gamblers up the coast to the Casino de Liban, and the shrill cries of prostitutes in the block-long Bourg Central Square in the heart of town...
Three weeks have elapsed since that noisy opening of Colombia's Congress, but Bogota's capitol building still rings with the shrill cries of the same opposition. Its aim is the overthrow of President Valencia and the end of the fragile, six-year-old coalition of Liberals and Conservatives that governs Colombia. The opposition's leader: Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, 64, a deposed and discredited ex-dictator who is making a surprising comeback. Right now, Rojas and his followers are little more than a swarm of annoying gnats, but the swarm is growing...
...Shrill Idealism. Perhaps in rebellion against tyrannical Daddy, Prescott's cynical, slatternly daughter Cordelia seduces one of his prize ex-pupils, Charley Strong, and shacks up with him in Paris. Poor Charley, missing one lung from shrapnel in World War I, has not long to live, and Cordelia genuinely loves him. But Prescott is determined to save them both. He pops up in Paris "at his most ebullient, his most awful." He takes over Charley and ousts Cordelia. When Charley dies, it is in Prescott's, not Cordelia's arms, and it is clear that Prescott...
...Prescott's Justin a "Garden of Eden," as one student believes, or a place of "little shrill idealism," as another thinks? The reader can take his choice though Auchincloss, who apparently enjoyed his own tutelage at Groton, emphasizes the shrillness. Auchincloss is careful to disassociate his hero-headmaster from any real-life counterpart like Groton's Endicott Peabody, but Old Boys everywhere will nevertheless recognize the rector as a familiar enough type. Auchincloss may seem to have expended too much sound and fury over something so small in the universe as a prep school; a crazed...
...taken refuge in Cambodia were sentenced to one year of "rest" in prison. Then Sihanouk took off in his French helicopter to go village-hopping, make speeches, and shower bolts of cloth and other gifts from his chopper upon the amazed peasants below. Sihanouk also continued a shrill diplomatic campaign that seems to assume that Cambodia, with its 5,500,000 people-a country known to many Westerners only vaguely as the locale of the magnificent, slumbering old temples of Angkor Wat-is somehow at the heart of the international scene and the center of the cold...