Word: solemn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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PERHAPS IT IS this hesitancy to generalize, to offer weighty and solemn judgements, that makes Didion's writing so evocative. Instead of pronouncements, she offers reportage. She focuses on an incident and notes every detail in uncluttered, harsh prose. Didion also has the reporter's curiosity about how things work. She investigates how orchids are tended, how freeways are monitored, how lifeguards live, how dams work, the philosophy and history of shopping malls. She is always honest in her examinations of a setting or person. She dams through accuracy, not forceful moral argument. In "Bureaucrats," for example, she perfectly captures...
...Soviet troops is stationed in Cuba?a disclosure that in turn produced a storm of angry reaction in the Senate. Although the State Department had emphasized that the Soviet force "poses no threat to the U.S.," Vance now assessed the situation in more ominous terms. In a solemn voice he told reporters, "We regard this as a very serious matter, affecting our relations with the Soviet Union. The presence of this [combat] unit runs counter to long held American policies ... I will not be satisfied with maintenance of the status...
...subject of more and more solemn study and the focus of boundless popular curiosity. It has become a truly prodigal fountainhead of entertainment, inspiring everything from sappy comedy to high tragedy, engendering chillers, thrillers and even fantasies that have been coming forth in salvos of histories, novels, movies and television shows. Furthermore, say experts who keep an eye on such trends, although it has not yet given birth to a Gone With the Wind, World War II is at last supplanting the Civil War as the country's favorite conflict for probing, pondering and-to be honest-enjoying...
...stiff and rather boring--but something in Dracula tapped the best of him. True, it was an impersonal vampire, a far cry from Langella's more complex lover. But Bram Stoker's Dracula is not much of human being, either. Lee was such a commanding Dracula, statuesque and solemn but with tremendous reserves of strength, capable of exploding at any given instant into blazing, hellish fury. Yet he was also capable of displaying a kind of cynical tenderness that lulled his victims into a trance before he turned animal and sank his fangs into their throats. The latter Dracula films...
After his aerial inspection of the West Bank, a weary Strauss flew to Alexandria, where he met Egypt's Anwar Sadat on the manicured lawn of the President's beach-front villa at Mamura. Sadat appeared solemn and strained before their hour-long talk. But when the two later greeted newsmen, a more relaxed Sadat referred to Strauss as "Ambassador Bob." Sadat said that following his meeting this week with Begin in Alexandria, he would immediately consult with Carter and Strauss on how "to keep the momentum going in the peace process." He warned that unless there...