Word: zeal
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Even while she spent her childhood herding sheep on the family ranch in Australia's Outback, Jill Ker Conway "took deep pleasure in ideas and wanted learning more than anything else." Now Conway, 41, brings that zeal to her job as the first woman president of Smith College, the alma mater of such feminists as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem...
FLAGS: THROUGH THE AGES AND ACROSS THE WORLD by Whitney Smith. 357 pages. McGraw-Hill. $34.95. Man has been making and waving flags for more than 5,000 years and, as Emily Dickinson noted, "No true eye ever went by one steadily." She did not reckon on the scholarly zeal of Whitney Smith. His hefty book conveys an encyclopedia of vexillology (Smith's coinage for the scientific study of flags). His enthusiasm is sometimes unsettling, as if the history of the dog were being told from the point of view of its tail. Yet his sprightly lectures are packed...
...their otherwise admirable zeal to get control of the budgetary process, the legislators may have cut too deep into defense. Congress is allowing the armed services to do little more than maintain their present strength at a time when the Soviet Union is steadily building up, in many ways alarmingly, its military power. Neither the Senate nor the House adequately debated the strategic implications of the dollars-and-cents decisions that they were making. When next year's budget is prepared, Congress would do well to examine much more thoroughly how the proposed expenditures would influence the vital balance...
With soul-saving zeal, First Baptist welcomes deaf and retarded children, as well as a surprising number of Chicago street toughs, some of whom come equipped with clubs, knives and chains that have to be wrested away from them. For small troublemakers, Vineyard keeps a paddle handy. Explains one deacon blandly: "We ram respect and discipline down their throats." And more. First Baptist insists on short hair ("cut so that it is at least one finger-width above the eyebrows"). Primness also counts at the church's elementary and high schools and at its three-year-old, unaccredited Hyles...
...importance. Agatha Christie just can't be taken too seriously, especially since in this specific play, she is poking fun at the conventions of the murder mystery genre, including her own work. At one point, for instance, she has Detective Sergeant Trotter--himself an insane parody of crime-fighting zeal--ask the other characters to reconstruct the crime. "Oh, that old chestnut," Mr. Paravicini sneers...