Word: drabs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...candidate looks like a smalltown professor, vintage 1956: the haircut is modified crew, the clothes drab and slightly ill-fitting, the rhetoric sparing and precise. The other candidate actually is a professor, but with his practiced flamboyance, a wardrobe of elegant mismatches and a manner that oscillates from pixie to pedagogue and back within a 60-second monologue, he comes across more like a ripe character actor in search of his next role. The contrast is appropriate because rarely do voters get a chance to choose between candidates for the Senate-or any other office-who differ so clearly...
...might be subtitled To Subvert Them All My Days or The Devil Is a Welshman. Delderfield's Angry Young Man, 1929-style, is a young bank clerk named Charlie Pritchard-5 ft. 5 in. of meekness, with horn rimmed glasses. After six years of diligent work in his drab little Welsh seaside town, Charlie still boards in a room formerly occupied by a pickle salesman. He has barely risen to be fifth of six clerks. "That's a safe job," everybody tells Charlie until the poor lad, in quiet panic, begins to see 40 years to retirement stretching...
Despite his successes, the Swiss-born, American-educated Lutz (he spent five years as a U.S. Marine jet pilot) has always attracted as many critics as admirers. A polished multinational manager who converses with equal ease in German, French or English, he makes many colleagues feel drab and parochial. He also angers some executives by breaking ranks with the rest of the industry, as when he doubled the warranty period on German Fords to a full year with unlimited mileage. Critics cannot deny the remarkable U-turn he brought off at German Ford, but some prophesy that he will have...
Sleekly coiffed, teased and sprayed, she glittered in the drab Nixonian setting, where to glow was considered a nono. She had an unbridled tongue and an addiction to nocturnal phone calls that converted her into a national celebrity. When she died last week, abandoned and alone, Martha Mitchell strangely seemed more of a figure from the distant past than one on whom the spotlights shone a scant two years...
What results from this greenhouse approach to writing is not so much an interpretive autobiography as the most comprehensive lab report in the history of science. In exhaustive--and exhausting--detail, we follow Skinner through a curious childhood and a lonely, almost morose, adolescence in a drab Pennsylvania town. Skinner recounts Kollege Kid pranks and personality molding teachers at Hamilton College, a year as a struggling writer, and a bohemian period in Greenwich Village...