Word: thumbnails
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...where the prison authorities would try to break a man, she explains, "when he was still able to say, 'I am me.' His hands were manacled to the walls, there was a lot of putrid water on the floor and lots of rats." The tour includes thumbnail sketches of such famed alumni as Al Capone ("He had syphilis and eventually died of it") and Robert Stroud, the so-called Birdman of Alcatraz ("The movie was a bunch of hooey -Stroud was a nasty person who killed...
...more direct route to a thumbnail sketch of icebergs, the reader merely finds the listing "Icebergs" in the alphabetized ten-volume Micropaedia, a fact finder's treasury of 102,214 short articles, none more than 750 words long and most much shorter. Because all the information for the Micropaedia is stored in computers, it will be easier to update than material in earlier editions...
...paid for a One-Cent Black on Magenta of British Guiana 1856: "a square inch of paper, with dogeared corners, a smudgy post mark and a badly rubbed surface." Author Mackay is the former keeper of stamps at the British Museum. He has produced a remarkably documented thumbnail history of some 3,000 stamps dating from 1840 to the present, with slightly enlarged color illustrations...
...majority of the gestures are obscene, many serve to convey respectable and useful information. If, for instance, a man in Saudi Arabia kisses the top of another man's head, it is a sign of apology. In Jordan and three other Arab countries, to flick the right thumbnail against the front teeth means the gesturer has no money or only a little. Bedouins touch their noses three times to show friendship. In Libya, it is customary for men to twist the tips of their forefingers into their cheeks when speaking to beautiful women...
...style to contribute to the tone of the collection. Funeral customs, diplomatic protocol, astrology as a historical phenomenon, and the treatment of children are all bizarre little sidepaths that serious scholars rarely explore, yet their unusualness makes it easy to sustain interest in them for a few pages. His thumbnail sketches of those sorts of topics illustrate an implicit thesis about the way things were in Victorian England, or wherever. These essays don't prove his thesis, but they flesh it out, and they are, as a group, a remarkably pleasant way of presenting supporting evidence. Far pleasanter for example...