Word: starks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Stark Reality. At the welcoming banquet in the Great Hall of the People, the atmosphere turned briefly ominous. Teng in his toast sternly warned the Americans against being roundheeled with the Soviets on detente, which the Chinese regard as naive and a self-defeating attempt to appease imperialist Moscow. Mystifying the Americans, Teng summed up Peking's world outlook with a Maoist aphorism: "Our basic view is, there is great disorder under heaven, and the situation is excellent." Less inscrutably, he added: "Rhetoric about detente cannot cover up the stark reality of the growing danger of war." Ford...
...considered Central Square too ordinary a place to think of a story about. What did they mean by ordinary? Well, there are neighborhoods resembling it in a lot of people's home towns. Broadway in New York is flanked by a similar utilitarian snarl of dingy department stores and stark donut or submarine joints. From my own experience in Midwestern cities of about 200,000 inhabitants or less, I can cull couples and triples of Central Square cafes with blacked out windows and steel doors bearing discreet Budweiser placards, or upper stories rented by optometrists, orthodontists and somebody named Arthur...
Bafflement is surely the least obvious fault of Bashevis Singer's stories. They all resound with a clarity that comes from sparse language and a discerning eye for only the most important details. And through this clarity, a stark precision that has captured the lives of a very small segment of mankind, there comes a kind of broader perspective I can only call wisdom because it seems so rare in the modern short story...
...knock came, I obeyed a longstanding rule of mine for interruptions at that hour. I didn't answer but waited for the second and third knocks, standing clear of the door in case the caller knocked it down or shot through it. Finally I opened the door, purposely stark naked, for you often gain a few minutes thinking time if ordered to get dressed and go with whoever is there." Now back in Nairobi, Griggs confesses that he is "beginning to feel like a midwife, a birth-of-a-nation expert...
...reason for this reticence seems manifest: Mrs. Meir's career ended on a stark and bitter note. During the Yom Kippur War, it fell to her as Premier to assess intelligence reports of Arab intentions and, as a circle of one, decide at what point the Israeli army should be mobilized. She waited too long; before mobilization was finally ordered and the battle with Egypt and Syria stabilized, Israel had lost more men than in any war since 1948. "I should have listened to the warnings of my heart and ordered a call-up," she now admits. For Israel...