Word: geniality
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Bird watching. Noun (archaic). A form of harmless staring, conducted in woody areas, by genial eccentrics often named Matilda or Chauncey...
...look like modesty -- though at his age, his looks are no longer flawlessly tailored to his boyish manner. Thomson has an occasion for his book and a confirmation of his imaginative insights into the star's character. The rest of us can enjoy a movie that is reasonably genial and diverting. At a cost of $10 million or $15 million, it might have made the studio happy. But even the misery of its unrecoupable costs is cushioned; the management that initiated the project has been replaced, and the new team can cheerfully disown it. And the Great Seducer skips...
...work to do," remarked University of Michigan Regent Thomas Roach last week. His comment came on hearing that Michigan President Harold Shapiro, renowned for his 15-hour workdays, would succeed William Bowen next January as Princeton's 18th president. An economist by training (Ph.D., Princeton '64) and a genial if demanding manager by reputation, Shapiro, 51, lifted Michigan in seven years from financial crisis to a prosperous institution loaded with new research facilities. Although guarded about an agenda for his new job, Shapiro, who will be Princeton's first Jewish president as well as the first president in 120 years...
...slip quietly into the night. Last week he launched a quixotic quest to prove his own career forecast wrong, announcing that he was "throwing my helmet into the ring" for the 1988 G.O.P. nomination. At his debut press conference in New York City's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, a genial Haig laughed off a question about his pugnacity by saying, "Inside this exterior of militant, turf-conscious, excessively ambitious demeanor there's a heart as big as all outdoors." Later, snipping a ribbon to open his Manchester, N.H., headquarters, he cracked, "I'm used to a bayonet, but today I have...
Wilson's greatest gift is his ability to make sense of anger: he writes naturalistic scenes of genial humor turning into an explosive violence that flows from his characters and from the warping effect racism has had upon them. Humiliated in the larger world, these people fiercely guard their dignity close to home. Defeated by enemies too distant to see, they lash out at their own kind -- a colleague in Ma Rainey, a son in Fences. These confrontations can seem like old-fashioned melodrama in comparison with the plotless minimalism now in vogue. But Wilson has the weight of history...