And combined with Mr. Langewiesche's willfully forensic descriptions and his self-congratulatory, almost giddy air at having spent so much time at ground zero, it makes for a weirdly voyeuristic book -- a book quite at odds with the solemn reasons that led to the cleanup efforts there in the first place.
By the time freshers' week was over they'd broken their promise, and what's more justified it with spurious reasons as to why their solemn pledge was not binding.
"There is a very solemn atmosphere in the dressing room for both reasons.
"For this reason," he said, "as part of my solemn obligation to the American people, I only use force when the time and circumstances demand it.
"We don't believe that a diagnosis of Down's syndrome should be a reason for termination," Buckley says to a solemn Phillips.
I can only say that, like 9/11, Columbine may be one of those subjects that many Americans, for understandable reasons, would prefer to be treated with the kind of solemn caution that is the enemy of creativity.
"For some reason, mummy and daddy are upset," one small boy recited to a solemn-looking audience.
In his melodramatic finale, when he exposed his "irreducible core", a solemn prime minister told the nation that if they wanted him to exploit the asylum issue for reasons of race then they had better vote for the other man, "because I can't do it".Is "the other man" a racist?
The reason was the botched hanging there in 1884 of Alexander Jefferson, whose gurgling, jerking, slowly swinging death turned a solemn ritual of justice into a horror show.
