Word: thrall
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...starts to comment on what we have been reading, asserting that "Beautiful words ruin your poetry" and "A poet throws all but truth in the cellar." Suddenly, as in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Herman Melville, one feels the roof of the narrative lifted off and oneself in thrall to a boy possessed...
...more scenes like that of the narrator’s Uncle Fernando air-dropped into a remote and impoverished Native American community. The near-lunar landscape, its equally alien and wordless inhabitants, and the echoes of pre-Colombian rite and myth manage, for nine pages, to hold in thrall the “civilized” characters and, I suspect, Fuentes himself. Even more stunning are Fuentes’ descriptions of the overlooked wonders of the human body. An elbow, the parting of hair, the scent of an armpit—these details become objects of ecstatic worship or muted...
...more likely way to regain footing would be a Grand New Policy Proposal. All of us high- minded pundits would just be thrilled if the President decided to launch an energy-independence Manhattan Project to help extricate the nation from the thrall of the oil sheiks. Bush has been touting Jimmy Carter- like conservation pinpricks in recent weeks; the air conditioning in the White House has been turned down. But it would be very un-Bush to call for the 50(cent)-per-gal. gasoline tax that even some conservatives are supporting. In fact, it's far more likely that...
...teach faith as science is to undermine the very idea of science, which is the acquisition of new knowledge through hypothesis, experimentation and evidence. To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of religious authority. To teach it as science is to discredit the welcome recent advances in permitting the public expression of religion. Faith can and should be proclaimed from every mountaintop and city square. But it has no place in science class. To impose it on the teaching of evolution is not just to invite ridicule...
...Grimm Brothers, Will(Matt Damon) and Jacob (Heath Ledger), have built a nice reputation as the ghostbusters of rural Germany circa 1812. Visiting a town that thinks itself in the thrall of some evil creature, the Grimms exorcise the demon, take the money and run. Their supernal powers are all trickery, of course--trapdoors and specters on a stick--but it's a good show. Then they come to a village where the mysteries can't be so easily explained away. Little girls vanish in the forest; trees tiptoe like goblins; a horse devours a child; a wolf...