Word: skins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...poems of Monty (Adeyami Lythcott), her eventual rapist. But it is clear that she is drawn to a black man as by an intoxicating musk and a not-so-fantasied danger. Bullins' Monty is a street stud who has climbed out of the ghetto without shedding his skin. With "Miss Janie," as he tauntingly calls her, Monty does not so much wish to make a score as to even...
...fire begins, and you get used to it, the destruction acquires a weird beauty of its own. The flames lick out from the 81st floor, and punch holes--bam-bam-bam--in the fabric of the building as the pressure breaks open huge wounds in the glass skin of the building and huge windows pop in series. Later, as the fire becomes white hot, the spectral beauty of the scene increases, as down below the whole area becomes an abstract, pulsing mass of red fire lights, blue police lights, and white search beams...
...lose sight of the human perspective as the director shifts into slow motion and we watch only a vaguely human figure on fire stagger through a room, framed by flames as floor, ceiling and walls burn. (Early in the film there are a couple of graphic shots of charred skin, but--after these few nauseating moments--the death is as distanced as the inaudible thud of a body falling 135 stories.) At the end, gelignite releases a flood of one million gallons of water from the water towers on top of the roof, extinguishing the fire in a tremendous rush...
Adams is absolutely first-rate at making the reader feel the river mist on his face, feel the brush of wet leaves across the skin of arms and thighs, or smell the stench of a sodden bear. This extraordinary ability to evoke physical detail carries the book to whatever success it has. Where the author seems weak is in the sentimentality of his conceptions. These shape what is not meant to be a children's tale into a kind of pretentious adolescent bluff: a tragic chronicle of conquest, corruption and decline that dribbles off into happily-ever-after...
...their coarse, nimble ponies, they rode like centaurs. They made cloaks from tanned scalps, and the skin of a right arm would furnish a container for their arrows. ("The skin of a man," noted Herodotus, who could seldom resist a piquant detail, "is thick and glossy, and whiter than almost all other hides.") To relax, they got uproariously drunk on thick wine from the Black Sea area, which they quaffed from the leather-bound skulls of their foes, or they would dump marijuana seeds on red-hot stones and breathe the smoke. Fortunately for archaeology, they buried their dead kings...