Word: captiousness
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Most of the books fathered by the Viet Nam war and mothered by anxious publishers have been either captious collections of preconceptions or argumentative exercises in polemics. In Viet Nam, says Washington Post Reporter Ward Just, who covered the war there for 18 months, "it was no trick to find the facts to back up the impressions, or the preconceptions: facts were everywhere, and with suitable discrimination could be used to support almost any argument." To his credit, Just does not argue. To What End is an almost apolitical and unusually successful attempt to convey a sense of Viet...
...that humility was ever a problem for Brougham. In his 56 years with the P.L, he has been more the kindly cheerleader than the captious critic. Easily the most popular sportswriter in the Northwest, he turns out homespun stories, and often winds up a column with what he calls a "pome," such as his piece of doggerel about a football recruiter: "He checks the young man's height and weight;/Can he kick and pass and run?/But here's the question the coach asks first:/'And how are your grades...
...after witnessing a scene like that, could be captious enough to ask why Solo took a cigarette lighter in there with him in the first place? Certainly not any of the 20 million steady fans who watch Napoleon Solo on NBC. For he is The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the most popular new hero on the television scene, and he whirls across the world as a special agent for an organization that quells the forces of evil. U.N.C.L.E. stands for United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, and it is actually a private FBI. Its producers, in fact, refer to Solo...
...thing wrong with The Wapshot Scandal is that too little of it is about the Wapshots. The remark is not as captious as it appears, for it was that old New England family--Leander, his wife Sarah, their sons Moses and Coverley, and Cousin Honora--that gave Cheever's 1957 book, The Wapshot Chronicle, its extraordinary vitality. Honora, quirky and self-willed as ever, admittedly comes close to being the central figure in this, the author's second novel; and Moses and Coverley, now mature and married, appear from time to time, usually under increasingly desperate circumstances. But most...
...awfully pleased at the piece you did on my column in the Boston Herald [Jan. 4]. At the risk of seeming captious, however, I must say that I think you did the Herald an injustice when you described it as dreary. Not that there isn't a dreary paper in this town, but it is the Christian Science Monitor, which is dull, dull, dull-and such a sacred cow, such a status symbol, that though people cannot stand it, they nevertheless call it a great newspaper. It's a terrible bore, really. The same cannot be said...