Word: crisp
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...blackboard-crisp terms favored by its Pentagon planners, the Laotian operation is deep into its third and final phase. Having slashed across some tendrils of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and choppered into Tchepone, South Viet Nam's troops are beginning to pull back to the border. As the withdrawal gathered speed last week, the question was increasingly asked: Was it worth it? The answer will not be known in full until the operation is over, but it can be partly determined by comparing the ARVN struggle in Laos with the invasion's original goals...
...Mitchell was forced to turn choreographer; almost by accident he has thus established himself as the most promising dance creator to emerge from the Balanchine ranks in recent years. Fete Noire, based on a Shostakovitch score, is a neoclassic Russian romp set in some imaginary imperial salon. At once crisp and buoyant, it demonstrates how well Mitchell has grasped the real secret of Balanchine's genius-the mastery of the logic and geometry of bodies in motion. By contrast, Mitchell's Rhythmetron is a throbbing, stylized Afro-Latin tribal ritual set to a score for 33 percussion instruments...
There are other flashes of crisp satire in this collection of essays. In a modern version of the Christmas carol Good King Wenceslas, the king's good intentions get lost in a bureaucratic maze. When Parkinson analyzes beards through history and finds them to be a sure indicator of lack of civilization (a thicket behind which older men could hide their uncertainties), he is at his bluff best. But the crotchety professor can also be dull. His strident common sense often sounds simply pompous; and his habit of describing imaginary conversations seems contrived. Parkinson's biggest problem...
...decade of war, social upheaval and uncertainty has blurred and shifted the memory of that crisp, snow-covered day when the New Frontier began ten years ago last week. Not only on the college campuses and in the underground press, but also in liberal journals, John F. Kennedy's ringing Inaugural Address now seems hollow, even dangerous to some of those who once admired...
...world that thinks of faith in terms of "crisis" and churches in terms of "embattled," the Salvation Army seems as foursquare and unchanging as the crisp Victorian bonnets still worn by its ladies. It is almost as if Norman Rockwell had painted the scenes on the mind. Bright-smiling women, their cheeks pinked only with the flush of zeal, ladling out free dinners in a Skid Row mission. Clear-eyed men in high military collars, tootling on flügelhorns and euphoniums on chilly street corners. A brisk song, a quaint sermon. A bunk for the stumbling drunk. Even that...