Word: grubbier
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...West is back, it's not necessarily the West of old. Call it political correctness or a long-overdue historical corrective, but Hollywood's picture of the West has a grubbier, less celebratory, more multicultural look this time around. The moral verities are not so clear-cut. Indians -- now Native Americans -- are more likely to be tragic heroes than whooping villains. Women and blacks, long ignored, are major participants at last. These adjustments reflect the revisionist bent of much recent historical writing about the West -- the view that America's westward expansion was not the triumphal taming of the frontier...
Somebody on the Taft University basketball team is shaving points, the rumor goes, and Spenser, the soft-centered hard-guy detective, soon discovers a grubbier scandal. Nobody at Taft will admit it, but the team's star power forward has been passed through his courses for nearly four years despite the fact that he can't read. Spenser is shocked -- he believes in truth, honor and grade-point averages -- and he sets out to discover which lizards, tenured and not, are responsible. The reader puts up his feet and gets comfortable. That's a bad sign. Too much comfort...
...Brooks, a member of the Fly Club, recalls that there was a "tremendous amount of drinking. Not to get drunk, but it seemed that there was a cocktail party every night of the week during the Spring, somewhat reminiscent of Brideshead Revisited." Yale, he says, is, "on the whole grubbier and lacking in that certain elegance and anglophilia that Harvard's always maintained...
...revelation that President Nixon paid only $792 in federal taxes on income of $262,942 in one year, the people will undoubtedly pressure Congress to raise the minimum tax and tighten up on deductions. Sentiment is building for some kind of public financing of elections so that the grubbier payoffs of Watergate will not be repeated. There will also be public pressure for laws requiring politicians to put on "public stripteases," revealing all about their finances...
There are frequent gleams of rough heroism in the murk of violence. Though Eraser's outlaws are notably grubbier, they are still recognizably the same men immortalized in border ballads like Johnnie Armstrang, Kinmont Willie and The Douglas Tragedy. If the clangor of their combat has been long silenced, it nevertheless has some unexpected contemporary resonances. Living at the heart of Liddesdale, the most intractable part of the whole border, and numbered among the toughest of all the reivers was a family named Nixon. · Charles Elliott