Word: braggart
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...Fast. In any year, Khrushchev was as extraordinary a dictator as the world has ever seen. Not since Alexander the Great had mankind seen a despot so willingly, so frequently, and so publicly drunk. Not since Adolf Hitler had the world known a braggart so arrogantly able to make good his own boasts. In 1957 Nikita Khrushchev did more than oversee the launching of man's first moons. He made himself undisputed and single master of Russia. Few men had traveled so far so fast...
...Many a braggart state has filed paternity claims for softball, but the most popular story blames a Minneapolis fireman named Louis Rober, who organized the game back in the 1890s to keep other firemen out of trouble...
...cerebral type who chose as his subject a man of flamboyant contrast. The man: Commander Will Cushing, U.S.N., whose raids up and down the Confederate-held coasts during the second half of the Civil War were the despair of Rebel defenders. Cushing was young and handsome, a braggart as well as an incredibly brave man. His superiors feared his escapades nearly as much as did the enemy (on the eve of war his horseplay got him expelled from Annapolis; later, at sea, his irresponsibility in humiliating a British ship's captain became an international incident). His most spectacular adventure...
...learned quotes from Lenin, and exhortations to efficiency and greater production. It sounded like (and might easily have been) a rehash of one of Stalin's old speeches. In Stalin's mighty fashion, Khrushchev took lofty cracks at top party comrades, referred to Malenkov as an "incorrigible braggart," and told how it had been "necessary to correct" Molotov on an important ideological point...
More than most heroes of this spring's novels, Chick Swallow deserves a wide hearing. His troubles may not be every man's, but every man will understand them. He is modest: "I think I can say my childhood was as unhappy as the next braggart's." He is reflective: "Man is not a donkey lured along by a carrot dangled in front of his nose, but a jet plane propelled by his exhaust." And the surest guarantee that his difficulties will induce immoderate laughter is the fact that he is the creature of Peter De Vries...