Word: ego
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Seshan's ability to enforce reforms is in no small measure the result of his personal probity -- and his ego. "Nobody can tempt or terrorize me," he says. "I am unbelievably fearless. I also live a life of extraordinary simplicity. I don't want anything from anybody." A strict vegetarian who does not smoke or drink, Seshan brought back nothing other than a $1.25 yo-yo after a month's visit to the U.S. three years ago. Says Jaipal Reddy, a federal legislator of the opposition Janata Dal party: "He is a bully, but his financial integrity is unquestionable...
...helped foster a folksy image that made him popular with his troops and the public. Behind the image, however, he was a thoroughly professional soldier who paid attention to almost nothing but his profession, living and eating alone in a trailer in the midst of his army. With an ego nearly as large as General Douglas MacArthur's, he was good at public relations but bad at human relations...
Bernstein possessed a monstrous ego -- in his last concerts, all heaven gazing and fanny waggling, he parodied the suffering artist -- and a biographer could hardly ask for a better subject. The son of a wig manufacturer, Bernstein went to Harvard and made a dazzling debut with the New York Philharmonic at age 25; he conquered Broadway with West Side Story and then endured the musical catastrophes of Mass and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; he abandoned his long-suffering wife Felicia and spent his last years as the chain-smoking, emphysema-racked Yoda of the Dakota apartment building in New York City...
...frightened -- all might fairly be applied to Streisand. She is the most popular and enduring pop singer of her generation; a filmmaker widely acknowledged to have more clout than any other woman in Hollywood; a political activist with the money to back her beliefs. Yet stories of her rampaging ego, of fights with co-stars and directors, of her obsessive perfectionism, are legion. More recently she has been knocked for being first among Hollywood's Clinton groupies. "On a clear day in Washington," a catty New York Times story put it, "you can see Barbra Streisand forever...
Fisher's alter ego is the screenwriter Cora. In letters to her unborn baby scattered throughout the story, we find out she's naming the baby Esme, even though it sounds like a noise her nose makes, and we learn that the she can't resist cracking a joke about serious things. Cora also leads what she calls a "noisy life" full of parties and problems and oodles of self-absorption. This cycle dominates, except of course, when she is forced to make room for the plot...