Word: ward
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...accident, the nameless hero of Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle (Doubleday; 468 pages) was a freakishly handsome, drug-addicted porn star who was also, deep breath, an orphan and a misunderstood genius who secretly wrote poetry. This is what Brits call overegging the pudding. But in the burn ward, he becomes almost plausible. He banters bitterly with his doctors and plans an elaborate suicide. Davidson could have just stopped here and called it The American Patient...
Hackney and the rest of the Met have already paddled quite far upstream by pouring additional resources into community policing. "They call us 'tea drinkers,' " says Police Sergeant Andy Port, on patrol with Police Constable Pete Ward in one of the rougher reaches of Hackney. The nickname refers to the amount of time officers working for the Met's Safer Neighborhood Teams spend chatting with locals over cups...
...drinkers are symbols of the Met's impressive breadth. The pace of their work is more sedate than the high-octane life of colleagues in rapid-response units or on big investigations. Still, the job has its excitements. Today, Port and Ward find a stash of heroin and crack cocaine in an old shoe on a ledge above the elevator in a tenement block. Next stop is a friendly call at a café called Cyber Juices. The proprietress welcomes the cops. "Whatever you're doing, you're doing a good job," she says. "I have to give you props...
...time, the Soviet government tolerated Solzhenitsyn. Khrushchev was eager to discredit Stalin and consolidate his own power, and Solzhenitsyn's work served his political aims. He became a global literary celebrity. But he quickly outlived his political usefulness, and his next two books, The First Circle and The Cancer Ward, had to be published abroad. In 1970 Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel prize for literature, but he wasn't permitted to leave the country to accept it. In 1973 he completed the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, a thundering, encyclopedic indictment of the Soviet labor camp system and the government...
...That the majority managed to stay sane and build a new life fascinates curator Hendriksen. In her own dark times, she says, she draws inspiration from the convict women, who would have thumbed their nose at authority and used humor and friendship to ward off despair. Writing for the catalog, she wonders why she and others are so interested in the convicts' stories: "Is it a sense of impotence of our effect, of our power to act in the world in a meaningful way? Are these women's stories a life affirmation to counteract the existential abyss that can sometimes...