Word: daft
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...Road shows were rummage sales of stuff out of vaudeville, burlesque-marvelously shoddy masterpieces offeree and fantasy, stitched together with cliches and ad libs. The series proved, if nothing else, that Crosby was nearly as deft-and daft-a comedian as Hope. But by then Bing was a giant with or without Hope...
...Morris was not, as his detractors suppose, a daft Luddite with pretechnological dreams of a feudal society sans feudal authority. "It is not this or that tangible steam or brass machine which we want to get rid of," he remarked, "but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny which oppresses the lives of all of us." It was not the machine but its owners who converted skilled into unskilled labor. When Morris advocated "simplicity," he was not calling for a peevish and cloistered asceticism but for a clearing away of inessentials. "I demand a free and unfettered animal life...
Uncle Albert may be daft-he carries a small pocket telescope to spy upon squirrels-but he is still concerned about his nephew Craig. Since the death of his parents, Craig (Jeff Bridges) has been living in the family home on a hill outside Birmingham, with only one black servant (Scatman Crothers) and a lot of pictures of himself for company. "It is time," Uncle Albert advises by letter, "to seek the comforts of your traditions." Craig's traditions are genteel Southern, wilted aristocratic, but they are small solace. What really compels Craig is what his deceased parents might...
Brian Tate, professor of government at Corinth University, is a brilliant, stuffy fellow, wickedly mocked by his own short stature. Wendy, a boneless counterculture chicken enrolled in one of his graduate courses, is unaccountably but irrevocably daft about him. He is flattered but sensible; 46-year-old professors do not (or should not) have affairs with students. Yet she clings, adores and listens in damp fascination to his explanations of foreign policy...
...that is three-quarters silly when queried about a knockabout entertainment, which uses the rape of Nanking as a casual scene shifter. The only answer is, "To the end of the book!" Still, the author does have a point of view: the human race is obsessively and sometimes grandly daft. Whittemore is a first novelist, age 41, an ex-Marine who learned Japanese as a Foreign Service officer in the Far East. He also served Mayor Lindsay in New York's antidrug addiction agency. What he caricatures with much admiration is the stupefying energy with which men pursue their...