And Ahab has the seductive gifts of a fundamentalist preacher, leading even the most level-headed and sane among his crew to adopt the madness as their own.
This was the moment that our middle-class lives were spent preparing for, encouraged from childhood, as we were, by parents, friends, teachers — the generations that had borrowed, and borrowed from, the culture of the colonizer, who had made the loan seem a gift, seductive, pain-free.
Beyond the Jungle lies the Lost Valley -- Heligan's restorers have a gift for seductive names -- with a woodland, lakes and wildflowers.
BOOKS lead on two biographies of Colette, "Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette" (Knopf; $30) by Judith Thurman, and "Creating Colette" (Steerforth; $32 and $27) by Fernande Gontier and Claude Francis... Colette herself possessed a movie star's gift for seductive illusion, and a matching talent for seeing that her charms were well photographed.
Some elements will be familiar from other books in the genre (the seemingly normal child with special gifts; the seductive, power-mad villainess), some from the Brothers Grimm (the enchanted forest).
What unites them is their gift for the seductive mixed message: a diet on one page, an ode to self-esteem on the next.
Alex Henderson from Allmusic, commented that "Rodger's [producer] gift for sleek, seductive dance music [Chic's specialty] is evident on such gems as 'Dress You Up'".
Geoffrey Himes of The Washington Post noted Saadiq for having "a rare gift for linking seductive melodies to slinky grooves" and stated, "Ray Ray is just a collection of disconnected songs... failing to establish a narrative.
The seductive artistry of Dalrymple's narrative gift draws the reader into events that are sometimes almost unbearable, but his account is so perceptive and so warmly humane that one is never tempted to break away.
In other words, the show never simulates Poe's gift for creating the most seductive and suffocating of nightmares.
