Word: bereft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
WHAT is really unacceptable in the vocabulary of the polite is talk of the aggressive war in Vietnam. Similarly, when antiwar students greeted President Johnson with chants of "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?", even the most antiwar liberal commentators deemed this a rude address, bereft of the reverence befitting the President...
...care who Philip Roth is, whether or not he has earned the license to write a novel so apparently decadent and outrageous, or whether this is the appropriate follow-up to a story about a gargantuan sci-fi mammary gland. The Great American Novel is certainly utterly bereft of Greatness, but it is great in the way that Tony the Tiger intones the word. And it is not, as some have intimated, the pretentious and self-indulgent product of a jaded literary titan who has nothing better to do than write the Great American Conceit. Roth has asked...
...there for the taking--that was understood. But an unconscious identification between sexes stalls the assertion of sexual differences. Instead, the spectre of sex, a nagging, hovering possibility, gave rise to a gossip that paralyzed. We missed our privacy. Our peers were all too close. We were equals bereft of our symbolic ground of sexual distinctiveness. Hanging about in packs, we preserved their sexless equilibrium with implicit codes. Here the identification takes shape in something like a plot to prevent sex. The self-consciousness is killing...
...analysis. He wrote the notorious Push Comes to Shove, a wild-eyed attack on everyone who did not agree that absolutely nothing could be permitted to disrupt the University during the 1969 Harvard strike. Although analytically unsound (students, he said, held radical beliefs because they were either 'crazy' or bereft of feminine companionship), the book was received with predictable acclaim by a sordid mixture of tired old leftists-turned-cold warriors and outright conservatives...
...stark black lettering looming, out from a staring white with the braille letter punched neatly underneath, you can leaf through and get a quick sense. The copyright page announces that the novel is "translated from the braille by David Rhodes," although Rhodes is not blind. The inside leaf is bereft of the usual publicity hoo-hah hinting at a lurid plot: someone saw fit to give nothing but an extended quotation from the text. The book introduces itself. But the immediate geographic vibration arises from the photographs interspersed--black and white pictures of Des Moines, Iowa; flat images...