Word: autodidact
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...everyone agreed, one of the planet's best dinner companions. At once sardonic and curiously boyish, he was both autodidact and polymath--his curiosity and his information equally boundless. To a film critic he might recommend some recondite movie that he had caught but that the latter had carelessly missed. To a filmmaker desperately behind schedule, he might offer to share his state-of-the-art editing suite to speed things up. To a harried studio executive, he might provide an evening of baseball nostalgia, centered on the New York Yankees, beloved since Kubrick's Bronx boyhood. Maybe Warren Beatty...
...plenty of incentives to pump up his role in Asia and Russia, he has remained mum. In particular, that meant resisting the temptation to "talk up" the dollar or the stock market or bash the Fed for interest-rate moves. And Clinton has, in typical style, been an aggressive autodidact. Aides recall the time last fall when, nursing an aching back, Clinton spent an afternoon stretched out on a White House couch with one eye on the TV and the other on George Soros' complex new book on the risks of capitalism. He finished it in a day and quickly...
...prolific writer and autodidact who authored eight books and 70 magazine articles, Carnegie was a voluble, if sometimes naive, adherent of the Victorian faith in mankind's progress. His quixotic ideals often clashed, however, with the brute realities of his steel mills, where men toiled 12-hour days, seven days a week. If Carnegie fancied himself the friend of the workingman, he had to face the ultimate comeuppance in 1892 when his associate Henry Clay Frick brutally suppressed striking workers in Homestead, Pa., in the bloodiest clash in U.S. labor history...
...Anthony Braxton...was a black politician, who was challenging everything, including the idea of racial construction and music as such," says Radano, explaining his interest in the jazz legend. "He is an autodidact.... But he is a product of the very rich cultural and intellectual setting of Chicago's south side. He is one of the leading thinkers and artists in the post-1960s jazz/'art music' intersection...
...admit he's pretty good at it. In The Rainmaker, playing Rudy Baylor, a young, undertrained lawyer trying his first case, he shows a nice sneaky knuckler, tracing an erratic path toward the strike zone. In Good Will Hunting, he pitches a sharp curve ball as a brilliant autodidact, confused by his own genius, alternately angry and vulnerable. Yet whether Damon has a high hard one, a true star's blowback fastball, is not a question these movies permit him to answer...