Word: discern
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Perhaps the worst flaw in O'Hara's writing, despite Bruccoli's disclaimers, is its lack of a compelling intellectual or moral framework. O'Hara conveys emotion and action as well as anyone, but it is hard to discern any overriding vision beneath his surface realism. As a result, O'Hara's world seems almost too simple, his characters living and dying in a near moral vacuum. O'Hara's fiction describes how his characters live but we are left wondering why they...
...intended the U.S. government to deliver mail, He would have given it a subsidy. Instead, as a victim of Washington's inability to discern Divine intentions, the American taxpayer has to cough up nearly a billion dollars a year to keep the postal corporation afloat--still not enough to prevent it from accumulating a current debt of over $3 billion. In the last fifteen years, the price of mailing a first-class letter has risen over 400%. In the oil industry, that economic no-man's land where rapacious monopolists reign supreme, the price of a gallon of gas rose...
...distinct political or theoretical position. He leans to the left, but never identifies his ideological beliefs: it is impossible to tell whether deep down inside, he is a closet social democrat, Maoist, or, what seems to fit best with his style of wholesale criticism, anarchist. It is difficult to discern the underlying basis of Kozol's critique--or to discover if he has one at all--for he fails to offer solutions to the problems he describes in such detail. In the closing paragraphs of the book, Kozol lets on that he is in the process of writing another book...
...avail. Even with my suede skirt, I was scared to death. I knew that all those Radcliffe bitches would discern in an instant that I was not one of them. So after I got here, it took me a while to realize that not all Radcliffe women were bitches. In fact, it seemed to me that very few of them were, and my roommate was even more self-effacing than I was. Once this realization sank in, I became indignant. How dare people go around saying these horrible things about...
...young explorer from Venice. The Khan's dominions have grown in scope and compass out of understanding, their diverse, unimagined wonders lost in last formlessness. As Marco Polo describes the fantastic cities he has visited in his wanderings, his words are a dam against despair. The emperor hopes to discern in them, "through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing...