More ominous in those long ago, three network days was its unprecedented ability to concentrate the nation's attention, to create or destroy figures of national stature, stars or demagogues, overnight.
In Pedernales, a city of twenty thousand people, about forty miles from the epicenter, seventy per cent of the buildings were destroyed; the figure was even higher in other coastal towns.
A largely destroyed human figure rides upon each block, with their legs hanging over the side.
Even if every one of those jobs were destroyed, the figure amounts to about one month's worth of U.S. job growth in the current economy.
The town was demolished, and the hospital completely destroyed (supplementary figure S3).
"He had to destroy the figure to beat it.
Look at the way he has come close to destroying your figure".
Still, he's drawn less to Wilde the writer than to Wilde the tragic figure, destroyed by the era he anatomized so tastily.
In "The God Delusion," Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author, presents Wise as an Othello figure, destroyed by his own convictions.
In "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," Milan Kundera describes how the police destroyed an important figure of the Prague Spring by recording his conversations with a friend and then broadcasting them as a radio serial.
