Word: vastness
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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Thus, in death as in life, Kosygin had been eclipsed by Brezhnev. Still, until he fell ill last year and was replaced as Premier by Nikolai Tikhonov two months ago, he had maintained an iron grip over the vast state bureaucracy that he commanded. World leaders had learned not to judge Kosygin by appearances. In spite of his characteristically hangdog expression, he had been capable of driving as hard a bargain as any Soviet leader since Joseph Stalin. Equally tough and tenacious in the Kremlin corridors of power, Kosygin was unsurpassed in his ability to sidestep the purges that...
...routed silver and bulls were Bunker and Herbert Hunt, Dallas bullionaires, who at one owned an estimated 100 million oz. of silver. In March, they used their $2 silver hoard to buy even more of the metal. After the market collapsed later month, the pair had to use their vast holdings, including race horses, art and antiques, as collateral to back the loans had made in their attempt to corner world silver market. A battered Hunt later said, "A billion dollars is what it used...
...relatively modest changes. A few new tourist enterprises sprouted, stocked to the ceilings with souvenir assaults on the two archetypes of the Carter presidency-peanuts and teeth, neither of which lends itself to much variety of treatment. On the outskirts of town, the state built a welcome center, with vast parking lot and artificial pond. Public restrooms appeared near the depot. There were two shops dedicated to selling good local crafts, and-miraculously and surrealistically -there was a new, genuine French restaurant in an old chicken house outside town that served one-star meals at half the New York price...
WALT WHITMAN was an American genius. He brought originality to an imitative literature, cutting and hewing poems out of the city streets and country ponds of a vast America. "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem," he said in the 1855 preface to his masterwork, Leaves of Grass. Never before had an American writer captured this relationship between the word and the state, the poem and the nation. Emerson wrote Whitman a few weeks after the publication of Leaves of Grass, saying he found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed...
...business of forgetfulness and rediscovery may be part of a vast dialectic sifting and refinement by which history discovers, and interminably rediscovers, whatever is worth keeping...