Word: brink
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...Brink of Vows. Ehrenburg's compromises came all the harder because he was, in many ways, a Western intellectual, steeped in European thought and experience; he knew what the world was like before Communism and beyond Stalin. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1891, he early migrated to Paris' Left Bank and the bohemian life of a young poet trying to recapture in lyrical verse the "beauty of the vanished world" of medievalism...
Berlin remained the major cockpit of contention: in 1948, 1958 and 1961, it brought the antagonists near the brink but always just a step short. Then, in 1962, Khrushchev made his biggest blunder by putting Soviet missiles into Cuba. It was then, argues Halle, that the cold war reached its hottest point. Khrushchev's backdown was the Waterloo...
Irrelevant Ideology. Looking up from the Cuban brink, both sides found that a political and military equilibrium had been reestablished. "A geographical status quo that had seemed too abnormal for endurance had endured so long, at last, as to begin to seem normal." Eastern Europe was working itself free of Moscow's grasp; trade between the Europes was eroding the Iron Curtain; ideology on either side was losing its relevance. "As with the conflict between Christendom and Islam centuries earlier," concludes Halle, "the slow churning forces of secular change were transforming the conditions on which the cold...
Until 1964, the Viet Cong ranks were entirely volunteer; conscripts were disdained as utterly untrustworthy. Then, on the brink of victory and needing extra manpower for the final push, the Viet Cong began drafting men. Today, conscription is one of the Viet Cong's most serious problems, required not for victory but simply to replace the lengthening roster of casualties. Viet Cong troopers are paid only from 300 to 500 per month, v. a government recruit's pay of $27 per month, and few youths in V.C. areas volunteer any more. Instead, they are given an ultimate choice: join...
...from Iowa to Texas and were ambushed and shot down near Arcadia La., on May 23, 1934. But Producer Beatty and Director Arthur Penn have elected to tell their tale of bullets and blood in a strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap that teeters uneasily on the brink of burlesque. Like Bonnie and Clyde themselves, the film rides off'in all directions and ends up full of holes...