Word: defective
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Still, a graver defect alienates us from the story at times. Hazzard suffers a cultural manneredness that sometimes overwhelms the pleasure we take in the novel's intelligent style. Occasionally we detect pretentiousness, a conscious literacy, an assumed intellectual and artistic sophistication. Allusions to literature, paintings, sculptures, mythology, and the great, exotic places of the world abound, and while we enjoy this armchair journey, Hazzard cannot always assimilate it into the flow; it becomes unfortunate, irksome baggage. She establishes Caro Bell, the Australian heroine, as a charming and sensitive woman, but Caro's literary cultivation seems incongruously elevated from what...
...glad to land a new account; she gnawingly wants to settle an old account. Their reminiscences grow tender as they conjure up growing children and the death of a toddler son. In a sudden access of intimacy, past desire becomes present lovemaking - yet the play's defect is that Emily and Ralph seem to be separating simply because they have run out of things...
...unborn baby healthy, or does a defect destine it to an early death or a life of debilitating illness? In many cases the answers to these worrisome questions can be found in laboratory analysis of a small sample of the amniotic fluid drawn from the sac surrounding the baby in the womb. Using amniocentesis, as the technique is called, doctors can accurately predict serious disorders like Down's syndrome (mongolism) and Gaucher's disease (a metabolic disorder); faced with a grim certainty, prospective parents can opt for abortion. But amniocentesis has its limitations; it cannot foretell all defects...
Nevertheless, there remains a defect, particular to Wallraff's method, that mars his objectivity. Teleological journalism--reporting with a singular goal, like the doctrinaire Marxism Wallraff's professes--blinds the investigator to other, equally important truths. This prejudice makes The Undesriable Journalist an uneven collection. Some of the narratives read like adventure novels; others, fraught with details of worker mistreatment in factories, sound like chapters taken from The Condition of the Working Class in England. No matter how scientifically he records his results with microphones, magnetic tapes and hidden cameras if Wallraff seeks only part of the truth, that...
...engineering defect probably caused the accident, but the actual cause is hard to pinpoint, Leary said...