Word: grasp
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Black students at Harvard with ethnocentric identities do not have a very good grasp of their own behavior. At the root of such behavior is an emotional preference (and for a few an intellectual preference as well) for certain parochial moorings--which might be race-linked for Black students, religious-linked for Jewish and Mormon students, language-linked and nationality-linked for Hispanic students, etc, etc. I did not say in my February 25 letter that as such parochial preferences were inferior to cosmopolitan ones, and if the quintet from the Black Students Association (Anthony Ball--Kenneth Johnson--Darryl Parsons...
Steinberg then tried new gambits. In 1968 he bought Reliance Insurance, a company ten times larger than Leasco. In 1969, at the age of 29, he went after a real giant: Chemical Bank, then the seventh largest U.S. bank. In that case, though, Steinberg's reach exceeded his grasp. Says Paul Hallingby, a friend and longtime business associate: "The Chemical caper never had a chance of succeeding. They were an Establishment bank, and they had ways of heading him off." The bank had plenty of old friends and ties and could afford just to ignore the brash young...
Plant workers failed to grasp the gravity of the situation as it developed, allowing the leak to go unattended for about an hour. Brief and frantic efforts to check the leak failed. As the situation deteriorated, the workers panicked and fled the plant...
While intrigued by American freedoms, political plurality and cultural diversity, the Soviet leadership is unable to comprehend fully the mechanism of the U.S. political system. There is little grasp of the relationship of American Congressmen to their constituencies, the real role of public opinion and that worst bugaboo, freedom of information, which they see as a threat to security. The idealism of the American Revolution, carried over into both domestic and foreign policy more than 200 years later, the Soviets perceive as crippling naivete. Its manifestations sometimes make them doubt American seriousness. Because such institutions are nonexistent in their...
...Rorem's style works effectively with gentle poems like Poe's To Helen, but it misses the force and majesty of Crane's bitter War Is Kind or Lazarus' noble ode to the Statue of Liberty, The New Colossus. The reach of the texts generally exceeds the composer's grasp. "The music was written in Nantucket during July of 1983," Rorem explains in a program note. "That July, as it happens, contained a houseful of guests; like 18th century female novelists, I was constrained to create on the sly." Too slyly, it appears. He should have sent the guests home...