Word: spent
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...much is actually spent? In the U.S., about $65 billion a year is spent on holiday gifts. There's been this giant [holiday season] bump in retail sales in the U.S. going as far back as statistics are available, back to the 1920s and '30s. In fact, as a share of the size of the economy, the spending has gotten smaller over time. Our fathers' and grandfathers' Christmases were a bigger deal than ours...
...fact, when she started writing her debut novel, The Help, she didn't think anyone would ever read it. But since coming out in February, her story about the complicated relationships between African-American domestic servants and the white women who employed them in pre-civil rights Mississippi has spent over 30 weeks on the New York Times' best-seller list. Stockett talked to TIME about growing up in Mississippi and what it's like being a white woman from the South writing from the perspective of African-American maids. (See pictures of the last days of Martin Luther King...
...spent five years trying to get a literary agent. How many rejection letters did you get? I have a record of 45 rejections, but there was one despondent summer where I blasted out about 15 letters without keeping records. I thought, What's the use? I'm just going to get a big fat no. So the official record is 45, but really it's probably more like 60 rejections. And then finally Susan Ramer at Don Congdon agreed to take it on. I couldn't even believe she was excited about the book. We ironed out a few wrinkles...
...person who might do the same thing simply because they read something on the Internet about bin Laden and that happened to appeal to their psychology." Once everything is terrorism, he warned, then nothing is. But while the motivations of the Virginia Tech gunman seemed perversely personal, Hasan had spent years telling anyone who would listen that the U.S. war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan was immoral...
...statistically safe (there have been no murders at Chungking Mansions for years), with its shabby hallways, dark corners and din of arguing deal hunters from around the globe, it is easy to imagine someone becoming embroiled in something dangerous there. Connelly, a former Los Angeles Times crime reporter who spent years milling about crime scenes and interviewing victims, says he chose to set a major part of the book in Chungking Mansions because, as a stranger, it is the type of place "where you want to look over your shoulder...