Word: thrall
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...aides fidgeted outside, Reagan and Gorbachev were educating each other on their divergent world views. Gorbachev charged that America was run by a military-industrial complex that tries to fatten defense spending by inducing U.S. paranoia about the Soviet Union. He told Reagan that the President was in the thrall of a cabal of archconservatives. He claimed that American think tanks, citing the Heritage Foundation in Washington and the Hoover Institution in California, were feeding Reagan plans "designed to break down the Soviet economy." Reagan replied with astonishment to Gorbachev's conspiracy theories. Indeed, he said, he had always operated...
...masculine misdeeds. And, as in other Mo Yan novels, peasants suffer and bleed while Communist functionaries strut, blunder and suck the country dry as Jintong's mother's breasts. The lad survives, though not without 15 years in prison, three in a mental institution and nearly a lifetime in thrall to his mammary fixation. "Whenever I saw a beautiful breast, my mouth would fill with saliva," he confesses. That weakness brings him a mountain of trouble, and every time fortune smiles?as when a cousin sets him up as chairman of a retail brassiere chain in the 1980s?indecisiveness betrays...
...copal, the "shriveled scorpions and fried grasshoppers" the Zapotec women lay out on the sidewalks, the trucks "rattling over cobbles the shape and size of human skulls." The skeletons that dance behind even a hotel reception desk remind us that the past here has the present in its thrall...
...meantime, the U.S. squad is getting jeered not only by its coaches and fans but also by a global audience formerly in thrall to its every NBA-marketed leap. The team is booed lustfully whenever it takes the floor or shows the faintest hint of exuberance--Greek fans chanted "Puer-to Ri-co"--and, yes, politics has a lot to do with it. The rest of the world understands metaphor...
...Jerusalem has a slightly piquant air because we know what the future holds in store for them. An earlier section in Cloud Atlas (Random House; 509 pages) has told us that civilization will destroy itself with its consuming greed and Homo sapiens will return to being primitive again, in thrall to animist spirits...