Word: thumbnails
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Vidal calls those who rule the U.S., has also produced remarkable exceptions like Eleanor Roosevelt, the subject of one of the finest pieces Vidal has ever written. He turns what is ostensibly a book review (of Joseph Lash's Eleanor and Franklin) into one of the best thumbnail biographies since Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. To Vidal, F.D.R.'s widow is the finest example of the Christian Puritan aristocrat, dedicated to improving the lives of the masses. In recalling her funeral, he concludes with a passage that out of context seems embarrassingly sentimental but actually reveals...
...theory. Spanish Jesuit Josó O'Callaghan, 49, a highly regarded papyrologist at Rome's Pontifical Biblical Institute, offers his finding in the current issue of the institute's quarterly, Biblica, only as a hypothesis. The most important fragment he has studied is a jagged, thumbnail-sized piece of papyrus containing only 17 letters, which cut vertically across five lines of text. His technique for identifying it and other fragments-a standard method that Dead Sea Scroll scholars have used to identify an Exodus fragment, among others-is therefore the rough equivalent of reconstructing prehistoric skeleton from...
Installed at the top of the steering column, the Sniffer consists primarily of a thumbnail-sized gas sensor. Whenever the presence of a potentially combustible gas closes the circuit between a pair of tiny electrodes, a yellow panel light flashes. This indicates that the Sniffer has been offended and will cut the ignition in ten seconds-just enough time, its inventor calculates, to allow the motorist to pull off the road...
Chapter One presents a thumbnail sketch of the golden years of rock and roll, as viewed by Guralnick while growing up around Boston. It's a few quick steps from Arnie "Woo Woo" Ginsberg to the Club 47 folk revival to Leadbelly to the blues. Guralnick then spends exactly one chapter on the history of the blues, intended primarily for the benefit of the beginner. ("For our purposes I think it is enough to say that the blues came out of Mississippi, sniffed around in Memphis and then settled in Chicago where it is most likely it will peacefully live...
...stories, he quickly points out, are Humphrey Bogart and Dennis Hopper... whoopee-do!). There's a biography of Nathan Pusey, which explains the "bitter man" as an evangelical rationalist; it is followed by a rogue's gallery of Pusey's administrators that includes some very outdated photographs and uncritical thumbnail biographies (MacGeorge Bundy's "academic speciality was American foreign policy," we are told...