Word: flaw
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Except for a general looseness in its first act, this is the only major flaw in Indians, which usually manages to maintain a high level of dramatic tension from beginning to end. Some scenes, like the self-mutilation in the Sundance, a sacred Indian ritual which Cody used for entertainment in his Wild West Show, have a deep visceral impact. Scott's Indians despite its inherent flaws is an inventive, well-directed, moving evening of theater which should help dispel the image of the American Indian as a cigar store ornament...
...When the Louis Budds inspected their new house in Tampa, Fla., they noticed a minor flaw: there was no water fit to drink. They sued the sellers of the house, only to be swamped with a tidal wave of legal argument. The 49-page defense brief, according to Florida Appellate Judge William C. Pierce, showed "exhaustive industry . . . citing and arguing 48 cases, five textbooks, four encyclopedias and one statutory provision. It abounds with sedulous references and dissertations on, among other things, percolating waters, the statute of frauds . . . express oral warranty theories . . . and the pyramiding of inferences. [But] when...
...anyone can handle both San Francisco and Boston, it is Ozawa. He is at once a demanding orchestral perfectionist-especially brilliant with 20th century music-and a genial man under whom musicians enjoy working. If a flaw could be found in his musical makeup, it is that he often seems to be learning his repertory as he goes along from hall to hall, hotel to hotel. Sometimes the results are scrappy, but more usually they are exciting and blooming with fresh thought...
...book's failure shows itself not in Cyril's character, as such, but in his flaw as an unreliable narrator. Not only does his insensitive greed provoke a climate for disaster (with Hugh's death in a fatal game of masturbatory coupe-corde, and Catherine's descent into madness), but his absolute self-preoccupation and enfuriating blindness deprive the story of its tragic force. Crushing Hawkes's poetry is the dead weight of what he contrives as Cyril's stupid prose...
Glory is the painstaking work of a brilliant young writer who is still testing his skills, as Martin tests experience, "with different acids." Nabokov has mastered so many narrative techniques that one sometimes forgets that like most great novelists, he is usually telling the same story. It is no flaw that Glory resembles Speak, Memory as well as his first novel Mary, and even Ada. In it, as in all his work, he caresses his opulent memory and exalts it. This fresh and graceful book is pervaded by what, in an aside, Nabokov calls "a writer's covetousness...