Word: crisp
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Still, McNamara cannot suppress the virtue or vice of his efficiency altogether. He is too coldly crisp when he ticks off his punch-card proofs-one, two, three-that the U.S. possesses "assured-destruction forces." He seems most himself when speaking of the Department of Defense as the "greatest single management complex in history." Nothing gives him more evident satisfaction than having pruned logistics expenses by $14 billion in five years through his "planning-programming-budgeting system." In the end, his standard is efficiency, and his integrity lies in remaining loyal...
Throughout most of a typical performance, the English rock quartet called The Who live up to their own modest billing: "A good, steady-going, down-to-earth pop group." Their beat is tight and jabbing, their guitar backings crisp. Their songs (Happy Jack, I Can See for Miles) aim to divert listeners rather than convert them. Un like current groups performing along the protest-and-prophecy axis, they do not come on like four hoarse men of the Apocalypse. Not at first...
...mixture in all this of English and American, humorous and serious, is what gives Sheed's writing its characteristic texture. His crisp craftsmanship seems to come from the English satirical tradition, but beneath this veneer the American grain runs deep: he knows his way intimately around the moral and physical landscape of the U.S. middle class. Sheed relishes the ridiculous but champions the sane and normal. His protagonists are ordinary guys desperately trying to fend off the world's idiocies and evils long enough to define themselves and do the decent thing. They rarely succeed completely. Solitary Baseball...
...Cushion. For any other collection, these 16 would be more than enough, but the adjoining dining room is fairly aglow with the Kreegers' most spectacular collection-within-a-collection. Eight mistily magnetic Monets offer a wide range of insights into the painter's gifts, from the crisp precision of an 1881 Varengeville to the moist verdure of a late (1906-16) Water Lilies...
...closed in so tight that he got blood on his camera. And Bill Holden, who, as one Wolper man put it, had played it all along like "the essential Hemingway man," admitted that suddenly he grew "weak in the knees." Later, the chief's son, speaking with a crisp upper-school British accent, explained to Holden that he had attended the ceremony as a gesture to please his dad, though the young man himself did not go in for that sort of thing. That is part of Kenya's ecology...