Word: taut
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Much of the course's popularity stems from Gould's reputation and personal appeal. Lectures are filled with the professor's taut energy and obvious excitement for his subject and students. The historical and literary allusions and illustrations he uses make the class more than a lesson in plate tectonics or evolution. Rather, the course seems, surprisingly, to live up to its rather ambitious title...
...Princess Daisy.) The two-hour show Something About Amelia, scheduled for Jan. 9, is receiving the prudent treatment that is usually accorded "controversial" subjects. Its promotional material comes replete with warnings for parents and a scholarly bibliography. Nevertheless, despite the effluence of manufactured sanctimony, Amelia is a taut and honest, if somewhat monochromatic, treatment of a painful subject...
...nine-year veteran of TIME who specializes in business and economics stories, DeMott was particularly pleased with the assignment because it permitted him to deal with a lifelong passion. "I've been fascinated by communications ever since I was a kid with two tin cans and a taut string between them," he says. "When I was ten, I got my own $10.95 telecommunications network: two battery-powered toy telephones that a friend and I rigged between our houses." DeMott soon graduated to more complicated gadgets, setting up telegraph keys with a teen-age friend and building electronic devices from...
...turmoil: Houghton's Brick, who is Big Daddy's son and Maggie's husband, drowns himself in alcohol and gradually becomes alive as he is forced to explain why he has turned away from the world and steeped himself in his own self-disgust. Houghton endows Brick with a taut passivity; his physical outlashes stun us with their uncontrollable violence, revealing his character's inability to accept his guilt about his feelings of love for his dead friend Skipper. Cox's Maggie exploits Brick's passivity and seeming impotence as she desperately tries to reawaken his love...
This revelation, added to postwar years of teaching, produced Lord of the Flies (1954), a taut parable about a group of English schoolboys who are deposited for safekeeping on a coral island while their elders wage nuclear war. Slowly but inexorably, they revert to savagery. "The theme," Golding explained, "is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature." The book sold modestly in both England and the U.S. (2,383 copies), but a paperback reprint issued in 1959 hit pay dirt. It became the desired and then the required reading for millions...