Word: grasp
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...course, everyone speculates about how these incidents occur at the time they are discovered. Years of analysis and research later, we develop some understanding of their causation, as we have, for example, with the Vietnam War. But just as we seem to get a grasp of how our government messes up, hungry journalists uncover more and more scandals...
Barker has no problem accepting women (which he calls either "girls" or "ladies," depending on the reference) as intelligent and capable. But for someone who looks so disdainfully on the Freudian philosophy, Barker just can't seem to grasp the fact that the world does not revolve around his penis. While his academic work is on the cutting edge of his field, his brain--and his body--are still operating in a 1950s mode...
...contrast to most American dramatists, who have excelled at depicting the struggles of home and hearth but not the larger world, Hwang thinks more shrewdly about mankind than about individual men and women. He has the steel- trap analytic grasp of the champion scholastic debater he once was, the lawyer he thought of becoming. The main weakness of his writing is that its purpose often seems more political than literary, more attuned to social issues than to the private struggles of the human heart. The final scene of M. Butterfly, when the agony of one soul finally takes precedence over...
Seen during the Canadian part of the current tour, Scotch Symphony, Balanchine's musings on La Sylphide, worked best with Yelena Pankova, 25, as the sylph. A springy dancer blessed with a high, light jump, she seemed to grasp the choreographer's oft repeated injunction: respond to the music and "don't think -- do" the steps. Senior ballerina Galina Mezentseva tried to make a romantic story out of this plotless work and as a result looked...
...ascendancy again last week in the Middle East. Capitulating to the hard-line right of his Likud bloc, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir fettered his own plan for elections in the occupied territories with stiff conditions that seem to doom the peace initiative. Almost before the players could grasp the political implications, a fanatic Palestinian wrenched an Israeli bus over a cliff, killing 14 passengers in what was described as an act of vengeance. Those civilian deaths will only harden hearts against thoughts of peace. Once again the small steps being taken toward peace were shoved rudely backward...