Word: guff
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...pain feels real in A Long Way Down, although not at the price of Hornby's pleasantly bitter wit. But what makes the book work is Hornby's refusal to give an inch to sentimentality or cheap inspirational guff. "I didn't want a book where they loved each other," he says. "That seemed like a kind of bad, Hollywood way to go. They are frank with each other, but mostly so that they can abuse each other." Spoken like a true heavyweight. -By Lev Grossman
...result is something more than the usual self-help guff. What Should I Do with My Life? is closer to the oral histories of Studs Terkel or This American Life than to Tony Robbins. What ties Bronson's subjects together is that most of them never got that Pauline postcard, that mystical memo telling them what they were here for. They had to figure it out the hard way. Many pulled courageous, tire-screeching, midcareer 180s, like the miserable marine biologist who threw away his Ph.D. to become a deliriously happy dentist, or the hard-charging vice president at First...
Blair aides think a lot of the guff they're taking from critics stems from the misguided view, similar to what obtained after Sept. 11, that Bush is about to start a war half-cocked. He doesn't want to, and he can't. Fall or winter is the earliest all the troops, weapons and intelligence assets could be organized for a land campaign, officials say - let alone a coherent replacement regime to which defectors could be attracted. But the carefully orchestrated images of transatlantic solidarity being planned for the summit belie a huge asymmetry in the two leaders' freedom...
...wary reader, overdosed these many years on both Hemingway lore and mystical guff about fishing, and weary, in addition, of all too believable accounts of alcoholic decline, might tune in to Championship Bowling and leave Lorian Hemingway's memoir on the nightstand. Fair enough, but Walk on Water (Simon and Schuster; 250 pages; $23), though it does deal with booze and fishing addictions (the first deadly, the second a kind of soul's balancing act, said to be curative), is chiefly the record of a writer growing up and learning her trade...
...many of us who live in New York City did think Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was joking when he said he was cracking down on jaywalking. It was something Humphrey Bogart as a private eye might have said sarcastically to a homicide lieutenant whose guff he did not intend to take ("That's real good, flatfoot, but isn't it about time for you to go out and arrest another nun for jaywalking?"). But then a law student crossing Sixth Avenue got a $50 jaywalking ticket. What we had forgotten was that Mayor Giuliani is never joking...