Word: avuncularity
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...love to rip apart English professor James Wood’s distilled volume of literary wisdom with a series of detached, postmodern, snarling riffs. But I can’t. “How Fiction Works” is just too pleasant a read. With a soft, avuncular tone, Wood sets out to investigate a fundamental question—how authors utilize both verisimilitude and artifice to invoke the real—by surveying a series of writing fundamentals. He weaves in and out of novels and ideas through a series of thought-stanzas until reaching his goal: a satisfying...
...Avuncular as ever, still smiling at his own jokes, Lieberman's 20-minute plea followed a folksy, flag-waving address by former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee. The big man with the muddy drawl, perhaps more famous for his "Law & Order" re-runs than for his legislative career, treated the delegates and guests to a populist paean to his pal McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska...
Maybe you haven't heard, but this is the year of freedom. First there was the Ron Paul revolution, in which an avuncular 10-term Representative from Brazoria County, Texas, raised more than $34 million as a pseudo-Republican candidate, garnered more than a million primary votes and outperformed Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson, all on the back of a get-government-off-my-back platform. Now there's the Libertarian Party, which sold a little bit of its hard-line liberty-loving soul in exchange for the most respectable candidate it has ever had: recently converted former Republican Congressman...
Tony is as smart, wily and manic as ever, but now he's a man with a mission: to dismantle his own company. Which doesn't thrill his longtime, avuncular, head-shaved partner, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges). No matter: Tony has never taken "Don't" for an answer. Like a geek in a Silicon Valley garage, a knight smithing his own armor, Tony retreats to his workroom to build himself a new casing. And he won't make Dr. Frankenstein's mistake of using shoddy materials. This will be no stitched-together, run-amok creature. It can't be Tony...
...Indeed, Buckley was in a sense mummified in his later years, retiring from the National Review in 2004, looming avuncular above the fray while the internecine policy battles raged, at that point primarily over Iraq. His movement, he seemed to understand with a certain melancholy resignation, had dissipated, had lost the exuberance and intellectual vitality of his storied youth. Increasingly feeble, he gave occasional speeches, delivered with his signature wit but devoid of his former rancor. In the end, it seemed, all the pater familias really wanted was a little peace for his family...