Word: inept
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sadly apparent in Clock Without Hands, a novel without direction or much visible point except as a tame foray into race relations. Novelist McCullers drops story threads and conies close to losing the entire narrative spool. A major character is suddenly reduced to a bit part. Motivations are inept and mystifying. Her people are all of a piece or all in pieces. What redeems some of these flaws is the special McCullers gift, the moment of high emotion when a lonely soul rapping on the wall of his imprisoned self hears an answering knock...
...Truman assigned Smith to another tour of duty-to clean up the Central Intelligence Agency, then under a cloud because of inept intelligence in the Korean war. Smith swept house ruthlessly (in his first month as CIA chief, he fired 600 employees). Three years later, when Dwight Eisenhower became President, he transferred his old friend and aide to the State Department, as John Foster Dulles' under secretary and general manager of the U.S. Foreign Service. In 1954, after 44 years of public service, Beedle Smith retired to civilian life, as vice chairman of American Machine & Foundry...
...Cambridge believe that all Harvard men should be "intellectual." They point out that the "playboy" is a dying cause that went out with the Gold Coast and postwar Radcliffe, and crusade to exterminate the last real menace to the Harvard community, the "jock." He's a crude, embarrassingly inept social thing in an HAA sweat shirt--a C student at best, these people maintain, as they request more scholarly replacements to beef up the total intellectual output of the College. The most common disagreement is with the admissions policies of the University, which, they say, "have been guilty of admitting...
...greatest criticism of the issue arises from the section entitled "Africans on Africa." Five of the six articles were transcribed from tape-recorded interviewers. Thus the writing frequently is married by inept expression or by the inevitable twist given by interviewers' questions. Although African opinion could have been the would have been new to most interesting part of Cambridge 38, a section that would have been new to most readers, the resulting articles were choppy and without factual substantiation. By limiting the interviews to representatives of Nigeria, Mali, Ghana and Guinea, the Cambridge 38 staff also failed to consider...
...point-in a parody of Khrushchev's own speech in 1956 enumerating Stalin's errors-Pushkov proves to a Communist Party Congress that the man who once had only to pound on a U.N. desk with his shoe to frighten the world has really been utterly inept. In fact, suggests Pushkov (and Author Beal) in a pointed reversal of cliches, it was the Russian bigwigs who saw Khrushchev "playing American roulette with Russian security" and looked on with dismay as he became "soft" on capitalism...