Word: bitterness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Durang's parents, and of the difficult years he had growing up in a less-than-perfect family. Along with a stream of stillborns, Durang drags onstage a number of horrifying events which would normally only be fodder for serious family dramas (including alcoholic fathers, sexist inlaws, overbearing mothers, bitter siblings, ruined holidays, ineffective counseling, desperate mothers and the death of aging parents), shows them in all their horrible glory, and manages to somehow leave the audience in stitches...
Durang doesn't merely display the horrible sides of his family for the sake of bitter comedy, however. The comedy of Bette and Boo is rather an obviously serious and sometimes clinical attempt to work through serious topics with large amounts of therapeutic laughter. The real majesty of Durang's technique is that in the middle of busting a communal gut, the audience simultaneously feels a profound need to cry. At the funniest moments, the audience cannot help but deeply sympathize with the profound desperation and despair of the characters...
...bills become law but also what a cad a politician (with a family back in the district) can be in the big, bad city. Usually the epiphany occurs when she has passed the sell-by date and a new beauty queen begins answering constituent mail. She may be bitter, but she knows to keep quiet. For every Gennifer Flowers who publishes a book and gets a spot on Larry King, there are hundreds of underemployed women working the back office during the day and feeding the cat and watering the rhododendron at night...
Those who hold that intelligence is a single, general ability and those who say it consists of many factors have engaged in a long-standing, bitter debate (although even those who believe in general intelligence say there are many subordinate cognitive abilities). Reviewers praised Frames of Mind for eloquently making new arguments on behalf of the multifaceted position, but they complained that Gardner's theory is too speculative. "The discussion is all hunch and opinion," wrote George Miller, one of the founders of cognitive psychology. The eminent developmental psychologist Jerome Bruner, a onetime colleague of Gardner's, said the book...
Ever since Michael Jordan stripped Karl Malone of the basketball and raced off to his sixth championship title in June, fans have wondered whether Jordan would hit the hardwood for another season. But now, with NBA team owners and players locked in a bitter contract dispute, the question is whether anyone else will show up, either...