Word: squirm
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...Sarah Vowell warns early on in The Wordy Shipmates, "Readers who squirm at microscopic theological differences might be unsuited to read a book about seventeenth-century Christians." She's right, for despite some lively writing, much of her tale of the settlers who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony involves internecine Calvinist squabbling. Thankfully, Vowell, author of the sharply funny armchair histories Assassination Vacation and The Partly Cloudy Patriot, injects a bit of Technicolor into her portraits of the stereotypically drab colonists: feisty prefeminist Anne Hutchinson, semicrazed zealot Roger Williams and the colony's first governor, John Winthrop, who coined...
...seen by many to appease Mugabe. But it could also be his final defeat. The ANC says it wants Mbeki to continue his work mediating the conflict. With his authority now undermined, that will be no mean feat. Mugabe may well see Mbeki's weakness as an opportunity to squirm out of a deal he never wanted in the first place...
Giorgio Napolitano, Italy's grandfatherly President, was trying not to squirm in his seat. But sitting center stage at a ceremony to honor World War II resistance fighters, the 83-year-old head of state couldn't help but wince as Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa shifted gears mid speech. "I would betray my conscience," La Russa declared, "if I did not recall other men in uniform...
...tricky, sometimes excruciating. Last weekend on Saturday Night Live, John McCain tried to defuse the age issue by making his own old jokes, cracking about his "children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, great-great grandchildren..." Yet it was McCain's former rival Mike Huckabee who provided the campaign's most squirm-inducing moment, in his own SNL appearance a couple of months earlier. After a tongue-in-cheek Weekend Update commentary, the punch line was that the candidate wouldn't leave the stage after the bit was over. This while Huckabee was still insisting, out in the real world, that he wouldn...
...little help from its neighbors. While Lee Myung Bak, the conservative-leaning Seoul mayor widely tipped to win South Korea's Presidential elections on Dec. 19, is expected to take a harder line with the North generally, Japan's single-minded focus on the abductions makes South Korean observers squirm. Kim Hyun Ho, director of the Chosun Ilbo Research Institute for Korea, notes that while Seoul claims more than 480 abducted citizens of its own, it worries that such a "very political" issue could cloud ongoing nuclear negotiations. "South Korea doesn't want this to be an obstacle...