Word: details
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Harvard examination system is designed, according to its promulgators, to test two specific things: knowledge of trends and knowledge of detail. Men approaching the examination problem have three choices: 1) flunking out, 2) doing work, or 3) working out some system of fooling the grader. The first choice of solution is too permanent and the second takes too long...
...book, which historian James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, calls "in some respects psychologically an even more unstable work than Mein Kampf," recounts in minute detail the slights -- both real and imagined -- that made Zhirinovsky's Kazakhstan childhood an unrelenting horror. In addition to revisiting the many injustices of poverty ("in school one girl had a ball-point pen and I didn't") and listing the names of boys who beat him up, the author bitterly recalls the misery of life in a communal apartment ("I slept on a trunk"), the lines to the toilet ("it smelled...
...reason at all. But often, when smart directors tackle a "controversial" issue like Vietnam or the Irish question or AIDS, they forget some of their art. Instead of building scenes deftly, allusively, they accumulate horrific detail to make sure you get the point. The films get longer, more ponderous; they sit on your chest until you finally surrender to their good intentions. In the process, they may become sentimental, cautionary fables of mistaken identity, compiling atrocities and piling them on photogenic victims. Suffering sanctifies Le Ly and Gerry's dad and Andy, makes them objects of veneration to the faithful...
...construct, Fire with Fire is flawed. Wolf shifts disconcertingly from serious argument to Camille Paglia-like flights of rhetoric -- something no one should ever, ever try -- to lengthy lists of examples to bolster her arguments. In the course of sorting through this debris of detail, the reader may well forget the original point...
...Patricia Schroeder is sponsoring a bill to establish a national firearm-fatality reporting system. Comparable to the system that tracks motor-vehicle deaths -- and which helps lawmakers tailor car and highway safety laws to real perils of the road -- it would identify gun victims and shooting incidents in greater detail...