Word: bronxful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Kate Simon's travel books and her autobiographical portraits, Bronx Primitive and A Wider World, are admired for their good sense, wit and pithy grace. These qualities serve her well as a popular historian of a period that has set the Western world's standards for art, culture, cynical statecraft and consumer spending. The legacy of the Italian Renaissance is never far from contemporary tastes; its style and egocentricities survive wherever easy money, ambition and ideas flourish. Lofty mindedness and low animal cunning rarely had a better stage on which to interact. As Simon puts it, "The susurrus of silks...
Right about the time this week that New York City Fireman Raul Muniz starts his 24-hour shift at Engine Company 45 on East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, athletes in Calgary's Olympic Village will be tumbling out of bed for another day of fun, games and potential glory. Muniz is no stranger to that daily ritual. As one-half of Puerto Rico's two-member luge team, the fire fighter spent pleasant evenings last week playing free video games with the boys and girls of winter and precarious days sliding down the refrigerated luge track on his back...
WOLFE presents these New Yorkers in their full, frightening shallowness. There is Peter Fallow, the British journalist/alcoholic in search of the big story that will pay for his drinking bouts. And Larry Kramer, the disillusioned Bronx assistant district attorney, hoping always for the big case that will earn him a promotion. And finally the Reverend Bacon, a Black Machiavelli who barters racial fury for craven ends...
...dynamic language speeds the plot along, even as the story line itself falters. McCoy's story is a conventional tale in which few of the characters surprise. As the result of a freak hit-and-run accident in Bronx, McCoy becomes embroiled in the farcical, gargantuan appartus of the municipal court system. And just as McCoy used people in his life to serve his own egotistical ends, so he in turn becomes the vehicle for power that Wolfe's other characters seek. McCoy is a tweedy sacrificial lamb, ritually slayed in a public forum...
...system that had served him so well before. He is thrown to a pack of hungry press animals, anxiously waiting in front of the precinct house to tear McCoy apart as he is arrested. The circus arrest is followed by the drama of a holding tank, complete with sinister Bronx criminal types, rats and other indignities to Sherman McCoy's person. By the time McCoy is arraigned, the Master of the Universe has become the scum of the earth...