I have seen people freed from drug dependency, marriages salvaged, illiterates made literate, businesses salvaged, lives salvaged and improved.
Nurse-midwives explained that they were forced to act the way they did to salvage lives.
Ultimately, though, it's the populist tradition that lends the demise of Polaroid instant film its poignancy: the power of all those ordinary pictures to salvage forgotten lives — and the finality of the moment after which the mass of billions of snapshots preserving millions of anonymous instants of happiness or private consequence ceases to grow and, with us, heads toward oblivion.
The faces in the crowd were diverse and anxious; Cajun, Vietnamese, African American, all pressed together in the sweltering heat, trying to find out how to salvage their lives after the worst oil spill in history.
Word of Ms. Eliot's travails reached Steve Zeitlin, the executive director of City Lore, and soon plans were set in motion to salvage this living city treasure.
Italian news media, by contrast, portrayed the salvage, broadcast live on television and the Internet, as a chance for the country to revamp its image after the wreck, in which the captain fled the damaged ship and the evacuation was chaotic.
He rehabilitated the procedure, ultimately salvaging dozens of lives.
But the owner, Red Brennen, a retired marine contractor, has had just about enough of paying taxes for a place he can no longer use now that he is out of the barge salvaging business and lives in Florida.
By looking at these nine lives — salvaged, and crucial — Marton provides a moving measure of how much was lost.
Polman might also have found more heartening anecdotes and balanced her account of humanitarianism run amok with tales of humanitarian success: lives salvaged, epidemics averted, families reunited.
