For many of Ms. Barrett's characters, science -- be it paleontology, entomology, medicine or geological botany -- is an obsession: its taxonomies provide a way of ordering the world; its dissection of physical evidence, a means of explaining nature's secrets.
The sellout crowd's mixed reception provided an answer to the obsession this week among sports fans in this part of the country: the question of how Ramirez would be received by Red Sox fans.
The book also provides an analysis of America's obsession with security, from death row in a Nevada or Louisiana prison to the massive complex of Guantánamo, which I had the opportunity to visit and which is, alas, the pure product of the American penitentiary system.
Merlis, whose previous novels are "American Studies and An Arrowow's Flight," provides an unflinching portrait of sexual obsession and the cold calculus of hooking up at gay bars, and he skewers the lawmakers Joel works for; Joel alternately lusts after them and mocks them as "white guys with bad comb-overs, voting silently in the middle of the night while C-Span played Vivaldi".
They even created Paravion Press, a home-run publishing house that both satisfies the founders' literary obsessions and provides an additional revenue stream indispensable to the business.
Some will say this elite medal obsession provides a misleading kind of success.
For Labour, the coalition's anti-state obsession provides a golden opportunity.
The Secret History – with its cast of undergraduate aesthetes swanning around the campus of Hampden College in their bespoke English suits, quoting Xenophon and Dante while harbouring hopeless erotic obsessions with each other – provides an ideal springboard for fan fiction, and Tartt myths are the real-life equivalent of fan fiction.
The present crisis provides an opportunity for the Pakistani military to give up this strategically misguided obsession.
If there is any justice in this world, the Springboks will annihilate England in the Rugby World Cup final on Sunday morning and strike a blow for southern hemisphere rugby's mad, crazy obsession with providing a bit of entertainment".
