Word: containing
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...Rocky-like prizefight that pits Pena against a younger opponent, an eerie trip with a radioactive cargo, and a climactic battle to the death next to the Bomb in the last minutes before the blast. Smith is also capable of subtler effects. His spare prose shapes images that contain haunting affinities: wild horses and Army jeeps; rattlesnakes and coils of electrical cable; the lustrous surfaces of ceremonial pottery and the polished plutonium core of the atom bomb...
Smith is less successful when he contemplates the meaning of it all. "We may be on the ground floor of the primary anxiety of the rest of history," says one character, benefiting from the hindsight of fiction. Records of the actual event contain revealing statements that defy the imagination. Said a general to the scientist who had called the century's most resonant countdown: "What a wonderful thing that you could count backward at a time like this...
...economic statistics contain a striking anomaly. Even as business activity increases and worker shortages grow more troublesome, the number of Americans on the jobless rolls remains high by historical standards. The unemployment rate stands at 7.2%, which is less than the 9.7% registered in 1982 but still well above the 5.6% reached in 1979, near the peak of the last economic expansion...
Meanwhile in Rome, the Italian government groped to contain the disaster. At least twelve vintners were arrested on charges ranging from manslaughter and grievous bodily harm to criminal association and illegal adulteration of food. Prime Minister Bettino Craxi announced that any vintner guilty of adulterating wine could have his winemaking license revoked and his profits and equipment + confiscated in addition to facing criminal charges. Agriculture Minister Filippo Pandolfi flew to Brussels, where he convinced leaders of the European Community that no ban on Italian imports was necessary. In the Vatican, authorities announced that the purity required of sacramental wine made...
Despite these efforts, there was no doubt that Italy had suffered a traumatic blow. In Denmark, where a 6,613-gal. shipment of cheap Italian vermouth was found to contain dangerous amounts of methyl alcohol, officials issued a ban on all Italian wines. West Germany imposed border controls requiring Italian wine imports to be cleared by government chemists. And in France, the government seized 4.4 million gal. of suspect wine and dumped at least 1.3 million gal. Clearly, it would be a long time before the world's consumers fully recovered their confidence in one of Italy's best-known...