Word: caustically
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This cure is abundantly present in a splendid Broadway revival of The School for Wives. The 309-year-old play bubbles with caustic merriment. A large debt of thanks is due Richard Wilbur's deftly idiomatic verse translation. Rendered into pedantic English, Molière's rhyming couplets can drone on with a perishing cumulative monotony. Wilbur makes the meters dance, and the players follow...
Compounding Penalties. The case involves a General Motors assembly plant in North Tarrytown, N.Y. For years, the plant dumped chemical wastes -spray-paint residues, metals, caustic cleaning agents-directly into the Hudson River. In 1963 the company was ordered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build a treatment facility tying into a regional sewerage system. Various planning problems delayed groundbreaking until late last year. Meanwhile, the plant kept pouring its effluents into the river...
That will not be easy. In his columns and his book, Guide to Dining Out in New York, Claiborne combines formal gastronomic training, superb taste and a delightfully caustic, even bitchy style. His dismay with Le Pavilion after the death of Henri Soule reached its apex when he spotted a red pencil in the maitre d's breast pocket. He lamented: "In the days of its glory Le Pavilion was the ultimate French restaurant . . . The waiters now seem to collide with less grace than they did in former days...
Geismar quotes great caustic batches of Twain's later prose, to show that he was an angry prophet who saw his republic choked by the corporate state. But Twain never did arrive at a consistent view of his world. As early as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, his feeling toward the technological society was widely ambivalent. He admired technology; he despised it. The U.S. was corrupted; it was the hope of the world. Man was a splendid fellow; man was changelessly evil. His own life reflected these inconsistencies. He delivered a fine speech lampooning accident...
Saved takes place in the now familiar world of redbrick slavery, of lower-middle-class depths, of dirty diapers and dirtier sinks. The characters are like seedy relatives whom one loathes and loves-caustic embittered mom, silent spine-shattered dad, sluttish frustrated daughter. Into their midst comes Len (James Woods) the perennial innocent, scarily looking for sex at the beginning, resignedly settling in as a paying roomer...