Word: terrorize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...When terror strikes, it always tears through the comforting screen of normality. One moment, midmorning shoppers and workers bustle along Nairobi's Haile Selassie Avenue at the downtown corner where a bronze eagle and a fluttering flag mark the five-story U.S. embassy. The next, the earth trembles as a thunderclap unleashes a mighty shock wave. Seconds later, black smoke plumes into the sky as the tarmac ignites, flashing fire to parked cars and passing buses. The blast shatters every window within a quarter-mile radius into lethal slivers, blows the bombproof doors off the embassy, sucks out ceilings...
...those of Nicholas II, his wife, three of his children and four faithful retainers. (The remains of two children, Alexei and Maria, have yet to be found.) In the view of the church, the boxes draped with the imperial flag contained the skeletons of anonymous victims of the political terror that engulfed Russia after the overthrow of autocracy in 1917. The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexi II, who has been accused by former dissidents of collaboration with the Soviet-era KGB, expresses doubts about the authenticity of the bones, despite positive DNA tests. He calls them the "Yekaterinburg...
...makes no difference. Whether you live or die here is entirely a matter of chance, not survival tactics. Spielberg's handheld cameras thrust us into this maelstrom, and his superb editing creates from these bits and pieces a mosaic of terror. We see as the soldiers see, from belly level, in flashes and fragments, none more vivid than the shot, rendered almost casually, of a soldier staggering along, carrying his severed arm--the struggle against mortality encapsulated in what amounts to a sidelong glance...
Michael Crichton is probably heaving a huge sigh of relief. The author of Jurassic Park and The Lost World is known as a stickler for scientific accuracy in his books and the films made from them. But honestly, how much terror could readers and filmgoers have worked up at the idea of people trapped on a tropical island and chased around by a pack of large chickens? That sort of thing is more in Woody Allen's line...
...makes the parents reach for the smelling salts or the shotgun, depending on the household, the guilt of impersonating the angelic 18-year-old before my parents had been the only shadow over my heady new discoveries. But I was torn between the attraction of filial honesty and the terror of parental persecution...