Word: abruptness
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...Islamic fundamentalism. Central Asia has been an arena for clashing values, an ancient land swept successively by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Mongols, Tatars, Russians and finally communist bureaucrats. During 70 years of heavy-handed rule, Soviet administrations made every effort to standardize life and co-opt Islamic culture. The abrupt end of Moscow's power has left a yawning political and spiritual vacuum. Since most of the region's Muslims have predominantly Turkic ethnic roots, the tug is between two versions of the Islamic state: the secular, Westernized Turkey and the radical, anti-Western Iran...
...lyrical best, which he certainly is in the remarkable play that reached Broadway last week after two years of regional development, Wilson can embed subtle and complex political commentary within the conversational riffs of fully realized characters. He can also end an almost actionless slice of life with an abrupt burst of violence, then instantly transmute that too into a redemptive act of -- well, pure poetry...
...that the truth. Unlike last week's abrupt 9-7 dismissal in the opening round of the Ivy Tournament against Dartmouth, Harvard did all the important things right, keeping possession in the opposing teams' ends and playing solid defense in the clutch...
...founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Like all Guare's plays, Four Baboons Adoring the Sun deals with ordinary people's inability to accept ordinariness, their yearning for mythic and epic significance. But it thwarts itself by hanging its plot on a somber and respectful treatment of the abrupt sexual infatuation and love-suicide pact of a pair of 13-year-olds. Shakespeare could bring it off in Verona. In Guare's rural Sicily, it seems mere wind. Mae West couldn't make it worse, and Richard Burbage couldn't make it better...
...short (5-ft. 6-in.), wiry figure, Singleton dresses and talks like any casual, bright 24-year-old. He peppers his conversation with an abrupt, exclamatory laugh and punctuates almost every sentence with the rhetorical question "You know what I'm saying?" In meetings he is usually the youngest person present, but he is often the most decisive...