Word: slacked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Alaska keep its courts from being swamped by criminal trials without the supposedly essential practice of plea bargaining? Unlike urban courts already streamlined to cope with heavy case loads, Alaska courts had sufficient slack to absorb more trials. Efficiency techniques instituted 16 months before the ban continued to whittle down court delay. More careful screening out of weak cases also helped. But the main reason Alaska's courts could keep up is that defendants continued to plead guilty in droves. The percentage of accused choosing to exercise their right to trial increased only from 6.7% to 9.6%. Why? "Because...
...glow of the Cyalume marked him 100 yds. to starboard. We could detect only the eerie green light, which now began tearing across the inky water and around our stern. The swordfish was encircling the boat with line. Mann cranked furiously on the reel, trying to take up slack while Peacock revved the engines, and the boat leaped forward...
...streets today are still sealed behind a high fence of yellow plastic panels, like a Berlin Wall of environmental quarantine. Every 20 feet a posted sign warns: CONTAMINATED AREA. NO ADMITTANCE. Some of the telephone lines leading to the shuttered houses lie slack in lush summer growths of hydrangea that bloom unattended. But no matter, because the phones never ring any more. Two years after the disaster known as "Italy's Hiroshima," the core of Seveso is a dead community, and no one knows when-if ever-it will become habitable again...
...with gaudy excess. No, no, no. They have soul. Quinn is discovered brooding sadly over his wife's beauty. Why does it make him gloomy? Because, he says, all beautiful things must eventually fade. That is in the nature of things. He is full of such slack epigrams, otherwise known as folk wisdom. Though this trait is more laughable than memorable, it serves the function of making him human, despite his wealth, his international wheeling and dealing, his lusty eye for wenches. Indeed, since everyone who has been in reach of a newspaper over the past 15 years knows...
Kazin's style is regularly tutorial rather than autobiographical; a succession of wives and mistresses make brief entrances and exits between mini-essays. Those essays, though, pick up nearly all of the slack of the personal narrative. They recreate some of the events that agitated his circle during the past three decades-the post-Holocaust trauma. Red baiting in the '50s. radicalism in the '60s-and show who lined up where and for what reasons. Kazin himself often wound up in the middle and caught grief from both sides. His scrupulous, sometimes pained explanations make his history...