Instead, Nottage tells their stories with an almost overwhelming empathy.
And here, laid out with an almost overwhelming accumulation of example, is a history of that measuring of time, a chronicle of the attempt to chronicle.
Dr. Redlener met recently with the homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge, whom he described as a "very able and responsive" official, who is grappling with an almost overwhelming mandate.
Sometimes, looking down at the pitiful one before him, the judge will be struck with an almost overwhelming sense of melancholy.
In his book, he compares their journey to the one taken by Odysseus, replete with temptations, almost overwhelming beauty and danger.
You still have to deal with the almost overwhelming ambition, common to Bernhard fans, to correct his woeful stature in the English-speaking world, as well as the equally oppressive realization that opportunities for doing so are fast running out.
"The End of Ice" illustrates with an almost overwhelming string of statistics that for many of the world's glaciers, coral reefs and ancient forests, the end is already here.
The promise of virtual reality is immense, and obvious to anybody who has seen a 90s cyber-thriller (Johnny Mnemonic, anybody? How about Strange Days?): A portable holodeck that can transport a user to any time or place, while main-lining the nervous system with an almost overwhelming sense of "thereness".
On one hand, the housing units themselves -- perched neatly on top of one another like Legos -- reach far up into the sky with an almost overwhelming, futuristic vastness.
But we, as readers, can feel -- with an almost overwhelming sympathy (a favorite term of Costello's) -- her own sudden and vivid recall of that moment in Homer's epic poem "The Odyssey" when Odysseus descends into the underworld with a live ram as a blood sacrifice he will use to summon up the dead he will encounter.
