Word: vividness
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...clothes make the man, interior decoration can sometimes be a vivid expression of the soul of a society. American Decorative Arts by Robert Bishop and Patricia Coblentz (Abrams; 405 pages; $65) forages through the American experience as expressed in its furniture and furnishings. The volume begins with a 1629 hooded wicker cradle, medieval in its lines, then follows the American progress from straight-backed Puritan spareness through the clotting commercial optimism and extravagance of the 19th century, and on into the 20th with its Saarinen plastic pedestal chairs and the eerie metaphysical fatuousness of Andy Warhol's wallpaper decorated...
...youngest survivors of the concentration camps, Pisar lost his entire family to the war and was the only student in his grammar school of 900 to survive. Although he eventually earned doctorates from Harvard and the Sorbonne and rose to intellectual and political peaks, it is the vivid memory of his youth that gives him his sense of mission--of destiny...
Pisar's recollections of the ghetto remain vivid. It was here; on his thirteenth birthday, that he was bar mitzvahed in a shabby synagogue in full sight of the pacing Nazi guards. It was here that he first met Ben, the lifelong friend who accompanied him through the camps and with whom he made a solemn pact to survive. And it was here that his father kissed the family goodbye and left home for the last time. A few months later, the ghetto was razed and those who survived were put on a train for the camps...
...about Libyan plans to build an atomic bomb, but only after he was already under indictment. Peter Goulding, another former aide, testified that Wilson had threatened to kill Goulding's wife if Goulding returned to the U.S. and cooperated with investigators. He also entertained the jury with a vivid description of Wilson's childlike delight when, after a two-year effort, he managed to sneak an M-16 into Libya. Wilson, said Goulding, "was very, very happy, literally roaring with laughter," as he handed the rifle to a Libyan official, who gave it "a full-function test...
...exposed small-town life in America. Nothing he wrote later earned as much praise and attention. He was nearing 60 and in his second marriage when Hilary was born in 1928. The young boy was both saddled and blessed with an old father who was already fading into vivid history. The poet regaled his child with anecdotes: "He could remember his grandmother on her deathbed, talking of Andy Jackson, of how she had heard him speak one time. His father and grandfather had known Lincoln, had hired Abe as a lawyer...