Word: yarn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Dirk Gently, the holistic detective ("We solve the whole crime; we find the whole person"), is diverted from a career of finding vanished cats by a daunting assignment: assist a former Cambridge classmate who is wanted for murder and -- oh, yes -- save the human race from impending extinction. The yarn embraces time travel, ghostly possession, quantum mechanics, musical theory, computer modeling, cellular communications and, from another galaxy, Electric Monks (they "believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe"). College-level physics...
...much more versatile. We can zoom in as close as we like; we can look at much more complicated structures. We can display the model on all sides and in different colors." In the old days he would often mark different atoms in his brass models with colored yarn -- which kept falling off. "The old methodology seems so cumbersome now, even laughable," he says. "It's like a dinosaur." Rossmann, who has also modeled other viruses, like the mengo virus, has gone on to produce the image of the site where an antiviral drug binds to the surface...
...credible was the prince that Miller even vouched for him after Zadeh had bounced a $250,000 check at the William Penn Bank in Philadelphia. In documents released last week, Miller was said to have repeated the yarn that the prince was being victimized as a result of "religious differences" within the Saudi royal family, and even offered to cover the amount of the bad check. Bank officials, however, called...
Texasville is McMurtry's eleventh novel, and by now his wonderfully loose- jointed narrative style slips in and out of comic exaggeration with practiced ease. There are no seams between the ambling lies of the 19th century frontier yarn spinner (his literary heritage) and the slick ambiguities of the 20th century novelist. When the tall tales have room to unwind to the horizon, as they do in Lonesome Dove (1985), McMurtry's haunting legend of the last cattle drives, the result is extraordinary. This sort of storytelling works best with a lot of action, however, and the new novel describes...
...victory in the booby-trapped underbrush, some grunts focused their gunsights on their comrades. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army (NVA) were shadowy figures in this family tragedy; stage center, it was sibling riflery. Stone's achievement is to pound and hack this theme into a ripping yarn about a good man, an evil man and an Everyman -- a young, romanticized Oliver Stone -- suspended between them with his life and ideals in the balance. In vivid imagery and incendiary action, Stone's film asks of our soldiers, "Am I my brother's killer?" The answer is an anguished...