Word: adrift
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While the Communists dream of power, those who wield it appear adrift, as a fin-de-regime cloud settles over the Kremlin and the maneuvering for power within intensifies. At least two members of the new Yeltsin team, Lebed and Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin, have obvious presidential ambitions and little love for each other. Lebed's aides in fact privately hint that Chernomyrdin will be a prime target of their planned anticorruption campaign. Both, however, are deeply wary of Anatoli Chubais, the new chief of the presidential staff. An ambitious, tough-minded proponent of privatization, Chubais in turn shares with...
...supporting characters are less fully developed but no less perversely compelling. Ronet as the monstrous Philipe is the model of the Ugly American, throwing around money, speaking loudly, insulting everyone around him. His knife-in-the-back treatment of Tom-- he sets Tom adrift on a dinghy, embarrasses him by making him seem ill-bred, makes him steer the boat while he has sex with Marg-- makes him hard to like by any standards. The hapless Marg is wholly pitiable, toting around a guitar to which she croons mercilessly, plotting out her book on Fra Angelica, becoming a pawn...
...years later, he painted The Gulf Stream, moving this apprehension from animal to man. A black sailor lies on the afterdeck of a dismasted sloop, adrift and rudderless in the deep Caribbean blue. Enormous sharks circle the boat. Their ominousness is reinforced by the zone of black water from which they rise. (The catalog, rather absurdly, suggests that celibate Homer was invoking that hoary phantom of the Freudian couch, the vagina dentata. This could make sense only to an art historian who has never been near a live shark.) On the horizon, a square-rigger sails indifferently...
...neediness come straight from its creator. As Callow meticulously shows, George Orson Welles knew acclaim and misuse from early childhood. Declared a genius at three, staging Shakespeare in a toy playhouse at five, walking on water in his wading pool--the legend goes something like that--he was adrift in a strained family. His opera-loving mother died when he was nine, his suavely alcoholic father three years later. Welles would memorialize his mother in Kane and find father-sponsors in his prep-school principal, Broadway's John Houseman, RKO's George Schaefer. He would also make himself a father...
...some such doldrum, adrift in giddiness or despair, Chabon decided to write about a novelist who can't get his next novel written. Sure enough, Wonder Boys (Villard; 368 pages; $23) is, rather too cutely, not just the title of Chabon's book, but of the novel his hero Grady Tripp can't bring himself to finish. Tripp's well-reviewed early books are receding into the distant past, and he feels fraudulent when his writing students admire them. He pretends optimism to his editor, but the truth is that his half-written book is an unreadable mass of unstrung...