Word: bookishness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hotel is about as festive as Disney World in a hail storm; the characters are so familiar you can turn down the volume and speak their lines yourself. In addition to the two romantic leads (Larry Breeding and Stephanie Faracy), the kids include one fat social retard, one bookish wimp and one wealthy, lock-jawed Wasp. For added measure the writers have stirred in a cook who re-enacts John Belushi's samurai routine and a maitre d' who resembles Danny De Vito's dispatcher from Taxi. Everyone yells a lot, usually about food and sex. Adults...
Inklings also suffers from some lofty competition. Pale Fire remains the final, funniest fictional word on the author-critic tug-of-war. Nabokov and very few others have managed to do what Wolff does not: make bookish people interesting in books...
...divisions of Chinese Communists in North Korea in the fall of 1950, Smith led the 20,000-man 1st Marine Division on a bloody 13-day, 70-mile breakthrough to the sea and rescue. "Retreat, hell!" said Smith. "We're just advancing in a different direction." A softspoken, bookish Christian Scientist sometimes called "the Professor," Smith was much decorated for his amphibious landings at Inchon and Seoul and during World...
...wake of its infiltration by a Soviet double agent. The task falls on the shoulders of George Smiley, typically a shrewd but atypically a paunchy and unglamorous secret agent. Moving to the offensive, Smiley assigns Jerry Westerby--dubbed "the honourable schoolboy" for his noble lineage and his bookish manner--to snarl the operations of the Soviet spy network. In usual fashion, Westerby's mission takes him to Hong Kong and Indochina, into the middle of an international narcotics ring and a KGB scheme to subvert a pack of Red Chinese politicos--and unavoidably, into a few bedrooms as well...
Stripped down to its essentials, The Lacemaker resembles dozens of tearjerkers about doomed, poor-meets-rich love affairs. The heroine, Pomme (Isabelle Huppert), is 18, a shy attendant at a Paris beauty salon. The hero, François (Yves Beneyton), is a bookish university student from a proper bourgeois family. The two come together while vacationing in glorious Normandy, then return to Paris and set up house on the Left Bank. There the innocent, star-crossed romance suffers a heartbreaking fate at the hands of the cruel real world...