Word: excess
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...merger could eventually reap savings of $1 billion annually for the two institutions as they combine functions and reduce overhead. This may mean layoffs of up to 10,000 workers, or 11% of the work force, as excess branches and departments are closed. But the merger with the revitalized BankAmerica was a necessary maneuver for CEO Robert Smith's troubled Security Pacific, which has been weakened by bad real estate loans. BankAmerica will now be a force in 10 Western states, and is reportedly considering a bid for New England's Shawmut National as well...
...took him from juvenile prison into the gym of ring wizard Cus D'Amato, made for great copy but little emotional stability. Twenty-eight fights and 26 knockouts later, Tyson was the youngest ever heavyweight champion -- a credit that looks great on a resume but is an invitation to excess for any 20-year-old. Tyson, naturally, RSVPed...
Beyond a distaste for excess, the reluctance of the Swiss to indulge in a splashy birthday bash also reflects a country increasingly ill at ease with itself. The questions raised go to the very foundations of what made Switzerland exceptional -- its status as an Alpine refuge protected from the wars and revolutions that have ravaged the rest of Europe through the centuries. The Swiss like to say they are less a nation than a conglomerate formed by disparate mountain people under pressure to defend themselves against outside threats -- from the Habsburgs and the Bourbons to Hitler...
Modernity too has provided a handyman's bag of tools to explain crime. Reasons range from an excess of chemically imbalanced junk food affecting the brain and judgment, to the violent climate engendered by certain movies, to governments failing their impoverished citizens. While some of these provide illumination, they can distance us from the crime. The initial moment of revelation, the strange intimation that perhaps "I too have sinned and somehow share in this carnage," that responsibility is dissipated. Economics, sociology and psychology enter. The crime deflates to a manageable size, one that justice can work on and prisons...
...individuals as about their troubled nation. Here is Kramer in The Song Dog, surveying the wares at a rundown country store: "On the crowded shelf of cigarettes and pipe tobacco, he saw, for the first time in years, the little cotton bags of shag his father had smoked to excess, so crude it came complete with tobacco stalks. Good stuff, that shag: it had given the old bastard the long, lingering, thoroughly horrible death he'd deserved." Nothing more is said about that father-son relationship -- and nothing is needed. That is characteristic of the eight novels as a whole...