Word: sketch
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...years at the controls. (She is no relation to Test Pilot Chuck Yeager, who went out of his way to belittle the mission in a quote to U.P.I.: "The Voyager is old technology. It's not a breakthrough.") Voyager began, as have so many fine notions, as a hurried sketch on a paper napkin. Five years ago the three were sitting in a greasy spoon in Mojave, Calif., when Burt Rutan turned to his brother and asked, "How would you like to be the first person to fly around the world without stopping to refuel?" The idea seized the test...
What would you like to know first? A preliminary sketch? On these low-slung mornings, your long-gone countrymen are attacked in their sleep by emphatic music played on clocks and radios that are yoked together. They run a mile or two to ward off heart disease, chomp high-fiber cereals to ward off cancer, and dress in the fashions of the times, which may seem starchy to you but in fact have never been looser. They proceed then to offices populated with machines designed to give them back the free time they have nearly forgotten...
...sketch of international politics would show America and the Soviet Union each seeking to hold half the world in thrall, or to fend off each other. These two countries are called superpowers, but the name is illusory, since the power they have to level the earth and each other is self-restraining. While the U.S. and the Soviets must posture about war, less muscle-bound nations, such as Nicaragua, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, go at the real thing. So fierce are Lebanon's internal wars, one wonders if the country that grew the timber for Solomon's temple will exist...
...book succeeds in illuminating a previously understudied area of immigration history, Bailyn frustrates the reader with his long explanations of his numerous charts and tables. Struggling through the first third of the book is worthwhile, however, as he goes on to display his unique ability to imagine and to sketch the lives of these British emigrants based on the thin documentation that remain...
...true, and it is. James gave readers fair warning in 1980 when he titled the first volume of this continuing autobiography Unreliable Memoirs. He cheerfully admits to rearranging details and changing names (an American writer becomes Alexander Lobrau, a construction company is called Piranesi Brothers). And no character sketch is more heightened in its absurdity than his portrait of his younger self, about whom everything apparently was hopeless: his head for alcohol, his "Medusa touch" in everyday affairs, even his clothes. One of the best running jokes concerns a Singapore-made suit whose shoulders engulfed his head whenever he gestured...