Word: bumpkin
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Yeltsin was surely aware that many Administration officials still tended to view him as a bumpkin and that he needed to overcome Washington's nostalgia for his sophisticated predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev. He succeeded with a confident, bravura performance that became a personal triumph...
...which opposites warily circle, passionately and adulterously engage, and ruefully part. Then there's the memory piece, in which a man comes to grips with the dark, dangerous and deeply buried secret of his childhood and by so doing achieves peace and self- reconciliation. There's comedy too: shrewd bumpkin goes to New York City and shows them city slickers a thing or two. Finally, there's a teacher- student relationship that leads to some mutually instructive, emotionally gratifying male bonding...
Gorbachev comes across as a brilliant bumpkin from cossack country who could not have made it without Raisa, a doctor of Marxist theory and, in the Sheehy version, the real "prophet of perestroika." How two devout party members could have climbed to the top of the Communist apparatus while nurturing heretical ideas is the subject that gives the author her central thesis of how Gorbachev operates...
Chatting to one of the regulars, she flipped up the brim, bumpkin style. I laughed at Chris. "That woman's got a sense of humour...
...have been soldiering with this lost patrol since we were kids: the gruff but caring sergeant, preternaturally wise in the ways of the enemy and the equally hostile terrain; the street wisecracking kid; the slow-drawling bumpkin; a man called Hammer and another called Pretty Boy. And, of course, a lieutenant who is both green and ambitious and therefore more dangerous to friend than foe. Such characters have been AWOL from most movies about Viet Nam, and 84 Charlie MoPic would have curiosity value if it only brought them back and restored them to their chief role: demonstrating the masculine...