Word: volcano
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...either succeeded or just decided to claim it had. Chemist Brigitte Boisselier, president of the biotech company Clonaid, is a member of the Order of Angels of the Raelian religious cult, whose prophet Rael says 4-ft.-tall green space aliens visited him 30 years ago in a French volcano and revealed that all of us are descended from the clones they planted here 25,000 years ago. With her announcement of a miracle baby named Eve and the group's subsequent claim of a second cloned birth, the most important debate in morals and medicine is delivered into such...
...would hike up an active volcano during a hurricane and skinny-dip in a hot, sulfurous pond. We would marvel at spouting geysers and boiling mudholes in psychedelic hues. We would share vodka and salmon caviar with melancholy park rangers in ramshackle huts. And we would be seduced by the mystery of Kamchatka, a land of fire and ice that remains one of the wildest places on earth...
...first outing, to the 7,620-ft. Mutnovsky volcano, was a day's bumpy ride from Petropavlovsk in a six-wheel-drive bus. Rockslides blocked the road at one point, so we piled out, doing calisthenics to keep warm, while the truck roared and slid around the frozen lava. That night we camped at the foot of the volcano, in a meadow carpeted with yellow rhododendrons and crimson bearberries. While we hauled water from a freezing stream, our cook, Elena Lukyanova, served up meat stew, brown bread, cheese, fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, and chocolates--one of many feasts...
After a night's rest in Petropavlovsk, we set off by helicopter, briefly stopping by the Karymsky volcano, which, since its 1996 eruption, has been spewing ash into the air every 10 minutes or so, with sinister rumbles. No wonder the native Itelmen people once thought the volcanoes were inhabited by gomuls--ghosts who roasted whales over huge bonfires, sending forth clouds of smoke and rivers of boiling fat. After camping by the Sestryonka River, we hiked through birch forests and fields of wild purple irises to the Valley of Geysers...
...also resembles Updike. Sometimes so does McCoy. Is it his own face that Updike is asking us to seek? Maybe McCoy is his wished-for self, diving into the volcano of instinct. But it's Hope who has his gift for rustling language. When she remembers the way her German-born art instructor spoke a "ponderous slow English, like concrete dripping in clumps inside a turning mixer," what you recall is that reading Updike has always provided the pleasures you hoped were in store when you went to the trouble of learning to read...