Word: franticness
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...decline in English standards results from the increase of mass education and from open-admissions programs-although to argue against ever widening opportunity of education is to confront one of the most cherished goals of the American ideal. In any case, teachers all along the line must play a frantic kind of catchup. Colleges blame high school teachers for sending them students who cannot read or write properly; high school teachers blame the schools below; and, with reason, nearly everybody blames the families from which the children come...
Born in 1933 in Shanghai, Chen grew up under the Japanese occupation of China, a frantic time unconducive to musical studies. After his family emigrated to the U.S. to flee the Chinese revolution, he began to study music at Berkeley. He got a masters in composition at Princeton, then waited on table in New York for three years. So it wasn't until ten years ago, at the age of thirty-two that Chen began to study conducting at the Geneva Conservatory. "I stayed two years in the class and when I finished I still didn't know...
...businesses are as nerve-racking as the chartering of behemoth supertankers to carry oil, and until recently few tycoons played the risks with such consummate cool as Norway's Hilmar Reksten, 77. The tanker business seems always to swing from boom times of frantic demand and soaring charter rates to busts during which expensive tankers lie idle and unwanted. Reksten, a ramrod-straight six-footer and lone-wolf operator, started out as a shipping clerk; in 1929 he bought a freighter cheap, parlayed it into a modest fleet (thanks in part to two rich wives), then seized on slumps...
Joseph Kraft was the funniest, frantic in his role as the guardian of the nation's self-image. In a column called "Nashville, the motion picture, tries--but fails--to tell what's wrong with America," Kraft points out the danger of trying to sum up the country. Indeed, "the analytic tools shaped by the likes of Marx and Freud have come to grief trying to define what's wrong." Leading into an interpretation of the film, he writes that "the film's view of the nation's flaws is so general and so wrong that it seems useful...
...most successful characterization in this production relies neither on fancy footwork nor on a funny face. James E. Maxwell turns in a masterfully understated performance as Snorty McGee, a third bootlegger who masquerades as a butler and surveys the frantic goings-on with a mildly amused detachment, politely refusing to adopt anything resembling a servile manner. Calmly observing a violent quarrel between his newly wedded "master" and "mistress," he helpfully supplies the words to finish off the sentences they are sputtering and in the tense full that follows the outburst, says with infuriating matter of factness, "Well, I suppose...