Word: perilously
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...plus a previously unpublished novella that gives the new volume its name. All seven pieces demonstrate, in concentrated form, the qualities that make Stone?s novels so harrowing, exhilarating and impossible to forget. His people either find themselves in, or get themselves into, situations of understated but hair-raising peril. In Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta, two druggy friends of an equally druggy American poet living in Mexico want to take him to see a nearby volcano. ?The way,? the poet is told once the trip has begun, ?is to go up the mountain and make it all complete...
...world has had a week to conjure up nightmare scenarios, yet no one has articulated the most frightening peril posed by human cloning: rampant self-satisfaction. Just consider. If cloning becomes an option, what kind of people will use it? Exactly--people who think the world could use more of them; people so chipper that they have no qualms about bestowing their inner life on a dozen members of the next generation; people, in short, with high self-esteem. The rest of us will sit there racked with doubt, worried about inflicting our tortured psyches on the innocent unborn, while...
...Blue let its bishop get trapped on the edge of the board, with little power and zero mobility. The awful tragedy of the edge-locked bishop wasn't fully salted into its code base at the time, so the poor computer was oblivious to the depth of its positional peril, and Kasparov won the game handily. But things won't go so easily for mankind this time around. Says a pleased Benjamin: "Deeper Blue understands more about bishops--when they're good, when they're bad, how to use them better. It understands rooks better. It understands knights better...
Without ever intending it, Hoogenboom has defined both Clinton's opportunity and his historical peril. If Clinton can deliver a heroic message on the commonplace and prosaic things of government (Social Security, balanced budget, education), he may climb up beside Roosevelt. But Hayes was not able to do it, even though he was a Civil War hero who, wounded five times and repeatedly cited for bravery, rose from major to general, and in office (Congressman, Governor, Senator and President) was judged to be intelligent, informed, squeaky clean and fully engaged with the issues before him. But there was no world...
Roper is issued a regulation villain (Michael Wincott, whose menacing baritone was used to better effect in the recent Jim Jarmusch corpse opera Dead Man) and a girlfriend in peril (British stunner Carmen Ejogo). A shame the star wasn't given a character to play, witty dialogue to speak or clever plot twists to unravel. But though Roper is often at gunpoint, Murphy wasn't when he agreed to make Metro. In his bumpy tryst with filmgoers, how long will he make us wait for another Nutty Professor? How long until we can love Eddie again...