Hidden deep in the Amazon, this river "is a reminder that there are still great wonders to be discovered". When geoscientist and National Geographic explorer Andrés Ruzo was growing up in Lima, Peru, his grandfather used to tell him wild stories of Spanish conquistadors, cities of gold, and an Amazonian river so hot it could boil men alive.
If boiling a man alive is not cruel and unusual punishment, then the moral compass of our society is seriously damaged.
When Mitch loses interest in Russell and the record deal collapses, the utopian turns out to be just another underground man, boiling with resentment.
Bent over acrid boiling tar these men are from Bihar, the poorest of India's poor, hundreds of miles from home, where their wages are sent.
Rather, he is one of those ambitious men – boiling over with surplus energy and devoted to a toxic ideal of honourable manliness – who abounded on both sides of the Atlantic at the beginning of the 20th century.
So is the boiling resentment toward men and women in power that can arise in a trade that requires, as Russell Baker once wrote, "sitting in marble corridors waiting for important people to lie" to you.
There I saw what looked like the activity of a whaling station: huge vats of meat boiling; a man with long hairy arms using one of them to stir a copper pot full of semolina; trays of white failed scones.
Pretty soon you'd face the impossible task of organizing all the information known to man — of "boiling the ocean," as Ferrucci put it.
Along with the delicate fresh pasta parcels, I've just tipped the bed of flour on which they were cushioned into a pan of boiling water, and the man in command at La Pergola, the most famous restaurant in Rome, is now calmly trying to retrieve it with a spatula.
