Word: causticity
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...drawing skills, at first glance, may seem to resemble a 6-year-old's. But her work has unique twists: she often incorporates photos into her comics, lending them another layer of reality. And her tone is refreshingly caustic. Saibara's fictional characters are delinquents and outcasts, and her nonfiction characters, mostly her friends, family and herself, aren't much better. And yet Saibara's intimacy with the characters allows readers to laugh with the unsympathetic lot, not at them. "I grew up watching women get beat up by their drunken husbands, raising kids fathered by different men, never smiling...
...like Guantánamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom'--another British import, about the treatment of detainees at the U.S. naval base in Cuba--have built compelling drama out of real-life interviews and transcripts, while such anti-Bush works as Sam Shepard's new The God of Hell, a caustic parable about a nefarious government agent terrorizing a Wisconsin farm couple, give off the sparks of real political anger. By comparison, the polite, political-science-class dramatics of Democracy seem as outmoded as the Berlin Wall. --By Richard Zoglin
...paints a noirish portrait of two girlfriends in the 1950s. The book's strongest piece, Gabrielle Bell's "One Afternoon," combines the yin/yang of a relationship study with a compact, twisty plot. Drawn with a simple clarity, it brilliantly updates one of Kate Chopin's devastating portraits of a caustic marriage hidden behind a veneer of politeness and misguided obligation...
...columnist. "It isn't just that men aren't opening car doors for women or offering them seats on subways or buses. It goes deeper than that. The high crime rate is one thing that discourages openness and courtesy to strangers" ... Fran Lebowitz, who made her mark as a caustic social critic with Metropolitan Life (1978), also feels that things are getting worse rather than better. "I don't think people have manners," she says. "I don't think people teach their children manners. I think boorishness is the order of the day. There has been a return to convention...
...album, denounce technology and urban culture with a blander-than-usual strain of Cake’s signature social criticism. The tracks make use of the cultural consciousness that Cake fans crave, and that McCrea obviously still has, although their delivery on the CD pales in comparison to the caustic tunes of Cake’s earlier days...