Word: lifebelts
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...Mailer has said that in the old days Podhoretz was a merrier man. Perhaps years of contrarian outrage have grimmed down the merriness. But the admirable Podhoretz has always lived by the gospel according to George Orwell: "The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet to be fully alive...
...culture, seem wholly unrelated. The American is a sensual naif; the Anglo-Irishman is a sophisticated puritan. Twain is happy for small favors; Shaw is ungrateful for major rewards. Presented with the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature, Shaw informs the Royal Swedish Academy that their award is a "lifebelt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety." Shaw's dramas brim with advocates of free thought and liberal policy, but his correspondence reveals him as a fool of the new totalitarians. Adolf Hitler is a "wonderful preacher of everything that is right and best in Toryism...
Back for the final heat, he gave 250,000 spectators a thrill by whipping so narrowly past the observation barge that newsmen aboard could count the stitches on his lifebelt. Then, 300 yards past the barge, Quicksilver began the turn. Suddenly the big hydroplane flipped over, vanished in a geyser of white spray. When the mist settled, only flotsam remained-a few splinters of grey plywood, a seat cushion, one shoe with a sock still inside...
Zamperini, tangled in the wreckage of the cabin, some 40 feet (he estimated) under the sea, yanked the cord which inflated his lifebelt, wrenched a window open and shot up to the surface. Two others, Lieut. Russell A. Philips, of Princeton, Ind. and the red-headed tail gunner, whom Zamperini remembered only as "Maclntyre," were the only survivors...
...weighing 100 lb., tore loose from their brackets and bumped down the clifflike deck." Seamen flung themselves overboard to escape the runaway shells. Thorpe himself slid down a rope into the thick, oil-coated sea, let go, realized with horror that he had not blown enough air into his lifebelt. He thrashed his way to a cork float...