Word: heroic
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Parkman's own labors seemed as heroic as the scope of his subject. He learned to shoot, ride a horse and maneuver a canoe, essential skills for the thousands of miles of travel that lay ahead. Mountains of old documents rose to test his fortitude. He fell victim to a variety of physical and nervous disorders. In the preface to an early volume, he mentions a vision problem that "has never permitted reading or writing continuously for much more than five minutes, and often has not permitted them at all." Somehow, he soldiered...
...Fell to Earth was both a dissection of the Bowie mythology to that point and a portent of the bleak direction it was about to take. Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, to be released in America in the fall, casts Bowie for the first time in a heroic mold, as a neurotic but noble British P.O.W. in Java during World War II. Bowie is graceful and compelling in the part, with enough residual mystique to transform what is basically a supporting role into a star turn...
...This is not at all the menacing androgyny of a Mick Jagger, whose odd dual nature appears to find its roots in the bowels of Greek mythology. Rather, it is represented by a fellow like Alan Alda, a man's man but wearing pastel sweaters. In fact, this heroic vision was realized long ago (minus the pastel sweaters) in such figures as Henry Fonda and the recently usurped Jimmy Stewart. What seems to be sought nowadays is a Californiated version of the former types, men who have achieved their "softness" specifically because of their therapeutic and ennobling association with...
Though pale and plainly sick the day she lost, Evert Lloyd made little of that afterward. Since she holds the other three major titles at the moment, a grand slam, admittedly not the calendar one, was lost too. Still her grace in defeat was heroic, in contrast to the style of the defending men's champion and top seed Jimmy Connors, who fled in a fury after his fourth-round loss to a big server from South Africa, twelfth-seeded Kevin Curren...
...Just a few years ago, in an excess of hubris, I predicted we were nearly finished with the problem of infection," Dr. Lewis Thomas, noted biologist and prize-winning author (The Lives of a Cell), observed recently. "I take it back." Through the heroic struggle of medical sleuths, most diseases faced today can be controlled, as some day AIDS will be. But microbes, which have existed on this planet far longer than man, show no signs of being unconditionally conquered. Amid the billions that exist harmoniously around us, there will always be some that become unexpectedly disruptive, mysteriously virulent. Said...