Word: whispers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...does much more than just check cards and books. Corliss probably dispenses as much information as the office in Holyoke Center: everything, he says, from how to get to the airport to whether a building belongs to Harvard or Radcliffe. In a whisper, he tells a fairly constant stream of women the combination to the locked ladies' room. His cubicle serves as a storage area for students' personal belongings, "especially around Christmas, when everyone's carrying lots of packages." When it suddenly rains and you've forgotten your umbrella, he cheerily dispenses plastic bags so at least your 20-page...
McCowen's narrative throbs with excitement or drops to an astonished whisper during his recounting of the miracles. He stifles a yelp of laughter at supplicants removing the roof of a house to get at Jesus (one of several surprisingly humorous moments). He rises to a tipsy bellow as Herod offers Salome a reward for her dancing, then sheers off into girlish silliness when Salome, as if for want of anything better, asks for the head of John the Baptist...
These opening words of This House of Sky whisper up a big promise. They say, on top of all else, that a real writer is at hand. Yet the bright prospect may, at the outset, seem at odds with the vehicle he has chosen for his first book: a personal memoir. The form, after all, is notorious for snaring even gifted writers in thickets of anecdotage and sentiment...
...turns out, that hypothesis was mostly hyperbole, the outgrowth, perhaps, of fantasies spun by helpless Russians who in fact could scarcely utter a whisper against the system of mass police terror. Gulag HI marks a judicious turnabout: "The Communist regime has not been overthrown in sixty years, not because there has not been any struggle against it from inside, not because people docilely surrendered to it, but because it is inhumanly strong, in a way as yet unimaginable to the West...
...notes,"³ those often pointless little entries at the bottom of the page, in which scholars amuse4 themselves if not others. The author holds these in high regard: "By using footnotes judiciously you can fill your reader in on general information he lacks, satisfy his curiosity about fine points, whisper delicious tidbits in his ear, and share with him an occasional small frolic." But banned are such standard and numbing footnote fare as ed. cit., loc. cit., op. cit., idem and ibid...