Word: dickensians
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Dickens was the first novelist who really nailed life in the modern city, and Gaffney's Manhattan, with its horse carts and street urchins, is still recognizably Dickensian. But the New York of Thomas Kelly's Empire Rising, set in 1930, is very much a 20th century beast: caffeinated, electrified, car and money and baseball crazy, with subways rumbling in its bowels and skyscrapers sprouting from its scalp. Kelly's hero, a good-natured Irishman named Michael Briody, is busy riveting together the skeleton of the Empire State Building, which at the peak of construction grew by a floor...
...Dickensian tales like Sidis' may help explain why most educators mistrust the whole idea of grade skipping. We catch a whiff of élitism around parents who want their kid to leapfrog others. What's called radical acceleration--finishing high school at 15 or younger--is viewed with particular skepticism, since one suspects today's striving parents may be no less aggressive in pursuit of their child's glory than Boris Sidis was. Judith Roseberry, president of the California Association for the Gifted, says several couples a year approach her seeking to have their fetus identified as gifted. "They...
JAMES GANDOLFINI has made HBO an offer it apparently can refuse. Gandolfini wants his Sopranos salary bumped up from its current rate--a Dickensian $400,000 an episode--to more than $1 million, and to tighten the screws, he sued HBO over an alleged contract violation. Not only would HBO's brass not budge, but they countersued Gandolfini for $100 million and delayed the March 24 start of production of the show's fifth season. HBO lawyer Bert Fields dismissed the actor's attempt to hold a gun to the network's head: "It's really a water pistol...
That this macabre imagination is coupled with dazzling craftsmanship gives the designer his heat. Beneath the shock of his antics is a natural talent coupled with technique acquired as a teenage trainee on Savile Row, the London street celebrated for handmade suits. After an apprenticeship of Dickensian harshness, McQueen harnessed his skills to the construction of cunning jackets, curved to just conceal the breasts, and trousers, called "bumsters," slung so low as to be rude...
...spring of 2001, the investigations into the Trintomar transaction had fizzled out. Seereeram was distracted when a partner in his consulting firm was disgraced in a separate financial scandal. Seereeram was turning into a Dickensian figure: the aggrieved claimant in a never-ending dispute over money. This was a character he knew well: Seereeram's father, a sugar-cane farmer, spent 15 years fighting a law that required farmers to surrender a percentage of their profits to the sugar farmers' trade association...