Word: genial
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...drama was hopelessly miscast. Fischer, the champion of the American way, was an antisocial, anti-Semitic egomaniac who complained about the lighting, the auditorium, the prize money, even the marble the chessboard was made of. Spassky, the cog in the Soviet machine, was a genial, sensitive fellow who liked a drink once in a while. He was Ali to Fischer's Foreman. Of course, Fischer ate him alive. Bobby Fischer Goes to War tells the story in fine, brisk style, interpreting the red-hot chess-fu action--the Ruy Lopez opening! The Nimzo-Indian defense!--for us nongeniuses and conveying...
...documentary, The Fog of War. Unfortunately, I arrived just a moment too late to get a seat in the auditorium; the most I could do was watch the video feed from the overflow room. This made the whole occasion seem even more surreal. Robert McNamara—debonair, genial and still very lucid at age 87—sat just a room away, before 700 members of the Harvard community, who, The Crimson reported, “received him with courteous applause...
...constantly so elated to see his students—all 584 of them. He can be spotted in Harvard dining halls more often than any other faculty member (probably including House Masters), includes his home phone number in his frequent class-wide e-mails and is a genial guy to even his critics. After all, it’s hard not to be inspired by Palmer—not after you hear his wavering voice, with its tinges of legitimate conviction not found in so many Harvard faculty members...
Punishment may seem an ill-fitting strategy for a genial fellow who was a surfer dude as well as a jock in his California teens. But Fox's German-American mom and Vietnam-vet stepdad taught him discipline and focus, which he needed as he took 15 college and pro coaching jobs in 25 years. (His wife Robin spent their honeymoon in the stands as Fox coached in the U.S. Football League.) So he knew hunger when he came to Carolina. "Losing 15 games in a row, everybody had scars. They were ashamed and embarrassed, and willing to do anything...
Absolute Friends bristles with that outrage. It is the story of Ted, a tall, genial, impressionable Englishman, and Sasha, a tiny, misshapen, brilliant, fiercely idealistic German. The two men meet for the first time as fire-breathing anarchists in a counterculture commune in Berlin in the 1960s and, improbably, become fast friends. The book's rhythm is that of their chance meetings. Over the years, Ted drifts into life as a minor diplomat, and a decade later, he re-encounters Sasha at an official reception. Now an East German functionary, Sasha proposes an intelligence operationsmuggling state secrets to the West...