Word: dint
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...looks Shakespearean in his tragedy. By dint of self-abnegation, he had almost made it through a campaign that many, including his parents, thought would be his to wage. While big brother was always the party-hearty sort, coasting through school, floating through oil busts, a cutup during the first 20 years of a checkered career, Jeb was the good son who worked hard and played by the rules. As his dad advised, Jeb made his fortune before making a bid for office, and meanwhile slowly climbed the party ladder in South Florida. But fate is fickle...
This I buy. Gage, by dint of significant trauma to his frontal lobes, did actually become a different person. But short of being shish-kebabbed on a tamping iron, I'm skeptical...
...some ways, Bridget resembles a latter-day version of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, caught as she is a picaresque series of adventures and winning goodwill from both other characters and readers by dint of sheer charisma (and some aid from Mark Darcy). Admittedly, those adventures include perhaps the weak point of the novel, when Bridget is framed for smuggling drugs in Thailand, which seems to be the excitement-and-terror locale du jour (see Brokedown Palace or The Beach). Out of urban London, Bridget's neuroticism seems hopelessly out of context: for all her moaning in her diary...