Word: stratum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...early 80s, slyly subtitles her fourth and best book "a period piece." Actually, it concerns two periods: the year before the Crash and the time after middle age. She is obviously an expert on both. With witty understatement and antic plot, she shows a high social stratum at its apogee. Messages are delivered on silver salvers. A titled Englishwoman seems to have stepped from a Gershwin song, down to the exclamation, " 'S wonderful." Irma's son, rendered useless by the lack of a trust fund, laments, "My parents have never had much use for me," and wheedles a large check...
Their risky efforts paid off. The cliffs, part of a stratum of sedimentary shale and sandstone interleaved with volcanic basalt, date from between 225 million and 175 million years ago. The entire rock formation was long thought to be virtually devoid of fossils and thus of little interest to paleontologists. In fact, says Neil Shubin, 25, a graduate student in biology at Harvard, the site they discovered "looks like Rocky Road ice cream. It's dark rock absolutely splattered with bone." Says his partner, Geologist Paul Olsen, 32, of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory: "We were shocked...
...traditional civil rights leaders who prefer to speak out on other issues. "Today we are faced with a new American dilemma, one that is especially difficult for black leaders and members of the black middle class," says Glenn Loury, a professor of public policy at Harvard. "The bottom stratum of the black community has compelling problems that can no longer be blamed solely on white racism, and which force us to confront fundamental failures in black society...
...average high of only 64° and fall to a dank and chilly low of 53°. Mark Twain, who lived in the city in the 1860s, is said to have remarked that "the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." The reason is a stratum of fog that blankets the city for part of nearly every day, dropping temperatures as much as 15°. Many San Franciscans dress in layers of clothing that can be peeled or added as the sun goes in and out. San Francisco fog does not arrive on little...
...Russia, Austria and Germany; and the Nazi occupation during World War II. Michener attempts to impose an artificial symmetry upon these events by telling the stories of three fictional families who do battle through the centuries against the country's successive despoilers. Each family represents a different stratum of society. The Lubonskis are nobles, the Bukowskis are members of the gentry, and the Buks are peasants. To keep the scions of these families rushing forth to affront Cossacks in 1648 and Germans in 1939, Michener has had to rely on a series of coincidences that strain credulity as each...