In "The Embassy of Cambodia," Smith captures the precarious status of an Ivorian maid's position in London — perhaps the precariousness of life for any recent immigrant who has been forced to leave a homeland — but, more than that, she captures everything that makes it impossible to reduce the woman, Fatou, to a type or a statistic.
It is work of admirable ambition and, indeed, perhaps its chief flaw is that it feels bulky and overloaded, determined not only to make its intellectual points about the allure and precariousness of the penchant for self-invention, but to offer a psychological explanation for it as well.
A gracious medieval city onto which a Baroque one had been precariously balanced (the precariousness partly accounted for the extent of damage during the quake), L'Aquila was also a commercial and cultural hub, a university town.
The precariousness of the situation for many of the poorest families across the Sahel is clear to see.
"The slowing" is, in some respects, a simple metaphor for the precariousness of daily life and the contingencies of the modern world.
Eventually, though, the other unions rebelled against the arrangement and, this spring, made a more or less surreptitious deal with the bosses to alter it, on the rationale that an excellent remedy for the precariousness of the position of part-time actors already exists: it is called "waiting on tables".
U.S. officials placed a $10 million bounty on Mr. Douri, who they say has coordinated many attacks on American troops.] The precariousness of Shiite support for the occupation forces has been further underscored by opposition from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, to American plans for creating a transitional government by July 1.
A startling event -- an accident that leaves a man in critical condition, the discovery of an inheritance worth $100,000, a man's realization that his ex-girlfriend has made a voodoo doll of his daughter -- stands at the center of many of these stories, serving as both a metaphor for the precariousness of life and as a turning point in the characters' apprehension of themselves.
Mr. Obama has told associates that he is aware of the precariousness of the political environment for him.
It also serves as an apt vitrine for Mr Ford's talents: his journalistic eye for the revealing detail, his knack for tracing the connections between the public and the personal, his gift for capturing the precariousness of daily life".
