Word: earnest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...effort features a more pedestrian detective along with her stock characters, a deadly earnest tone and a climactic burst of violence befitting its story of long-calculated revenge. Although the setting remains British, Help the Poor Struggler is rather an American novel, with brooding and cynical overtones of Raymond Chandler ("It wasn't the pale skin of a man who'd not seen enough of the sun. It was more as if one had put a paintbrush to an emotion -- despair, desolation, whatever -- and tinged it in that sickly whitishgray"). Depth of characterization is not Grimes' strong suit...
...Latin lover: Rudolph Valentino (Italy); the noble warlord: Sessue Hayakawa (Japan); the tragic heroine: Pola Negri (Poland); the vamp goddess: Greta Garbo (Sweden). Nor was the flood stanched with the arrival of talking pictures in the late 1920s. Hollywood saw the Babel of exotic accents as one more earnest of its cosmopolitan reach. And so Maurice Chevalier and Charles Boyer brought their suavity from France; Marlene Dietrich (Germany), Hedy Lamarr (Austria) and Ingrid Bergman (Sweden) helped Garbo flesh out the fantasy of the European woman. From south of the border Carmen Miranda brought her fruity headdresses, Gilbert Roland his purring...
Nathan Zuckerman made his debut in Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer (1979); the hero was an earnest young author in the process of learning that art and life issued contradictory demands. By the time of Zuckerman Unbound (1981), Nathan had become absurdly rich and famous, thanks to a scandalous best-selling novel that estranged him from his father and the rest of his family. Zuckerman's punishment came in The Anatomy Lesson (1983), in which he appeared as a neurasthenic wreck hoping to start life all over again as a medical student...
...gain power, power which has been and would continue to be directed against Americans. The Shiites and those who support them are waging a war against the U.S. and our solid allies. They are bent on the destruction of the free world, a free world Israel represents in earnest...
DeSisto, in contrast, was earnest and amiable, beginning his summation with a windy anecdote about Abraham Lincoln. Instead of reviewing his case, he painted an emotional and highly colored tableau of the alleged murder attempts. With his hands resting on the front of the jury box, DeSisto pleaded with the jurors to try to relive the crime, to put themselves in the room where Sunny von Bulow went into her two comas. As if holding a syringe in his hand, DeSisto asked, "Can you see it? As he was pushing the plunger down, can you see it? The defendant then...