Word: deft
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...tiresome in its first two appearances, beguiling in its third (a snatch of music played on two balloons and a one-string violin). But John Gilkey, Quidam's emcee, is a gawky delight, especially in a dance routine with a hat rack. Gilkey knows that the body is a deft comic instrument, even as the charming Chinese girls who do the "diabolos" routine (spinning a toy on a string while prancing nonstop in short skirts and Tin Woodman hats) know how to make this precision aerobic workout seem like schoolyard...
...notably its stubborn insistence that spinal misalignments cause or underlie most ailments, including those far afield from the backbone), its use of vertebral manipulation has proved useful not only in treating acute low-back pain and other muscular and neurological problems but also in comforting patients who appreciate the deft way skilled chiropractors use their hands. (Osteopaths, licensed physicians whose education is essentially the same as that of M.D.s, also include manipulative therapy in their treatments.) Studies at the University of Miami School of Medicine's Touch Research Institute have found that premature infants gain weight much faster after being...
This is O.K. for a while. Director Edward Zwick has a deft way with combat scenes, and nobody is better than Washington at conveying tormented dutifulness. What's not so O.K. is Courage Under Fire's pretensions to moral seriousness. It would like to be a thoughtful meditation on bravery, honor, truth--the big topics. But it's really just a crudely manipulated mystery story, building suspense by arbitrarily withholding pertinent information. It's hard to take its thoughts on integrity seriously when it exhibits so little of that quality in its own storytelling...
Alan Ayckbourn's book builds, with deft comic logic, from a tangle of mistaken identities to the climactic remark, "There's a cat-burgling pig in my bedroom!" Lloyd Webber's tunes are inventive and sweetly chipper. The effect is of two precocious lads putting on a genial public-school charade. By Jeeves may not be lighter than air, but it's surely lighter than Guerre...
Susan Isaacs has written a succession of deft, funny thrillers set on Long Island, New York--Compromising Positions is one of the best--about wise-guy women who talk themselves in and out of some fairly deadly predicaments. The better half of her new novel, Lily White (HarperCollins; 460 pages; $25), carries on cheerfully with this agreeable storytelling. The main character, Lily White, is a 45-year-old defense attorney whose new client is a gifted con man. He's a tall, awkward fellow who seems too clumsy to be slick, but his specialty is romancing rich, lonely, middle-aged...