Word: instinctively
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Whyte puts his faith in something he calls "the impulse of the center," which animates his vision of the teeming urban core. "You see it at cocktail parties," he says, "the phenomenon where people move toward the center. It is an instinct to be in a position of maximum choice...
...Learn in Medical School and Take This Book to the Hospital with You. The message is that a smart patient is an informed patient, who challenges a doctor's authority rather than submits uncritically to the physician's will and whims. Yet that approach rubs raw against a basic instinct. Patients want to trust their doctors, to view them as benign and authoritative. Even those who privately question a doctor's decisions may be loath to express dissent. Doctors admit that an aggressive or challenging patient can be very irritating. "When you can, under certain circumstances, play God, you sometimes...
...that dread word, commitment. The women work at being hip and wary but are as overmastered by virility as any Victorian maiden ("With his touch, the will seemed to drain out of her"). Susan Minot, who made a notable debut with her 1986 novel Monkeys, has a laser instinct for the clinching detail and the giveaway phrase. She can summon descriptive power when she wants it ("Clouds rose up, golden, fisted, dwarfing the islands"). But the very unity of this collection produces a sameness. The reader begins to wonder, Doesn't Minot know anyone who is married, or older than...
...road, Naipaul operates largely through honed instinct, avoiding official sources and searching for the obscure informant and off-center incident. Asked why he did not interview Reuben Greenberg, the black Jewish police chief of Charleston, S.C., Naipaul grimaces and says simply, "Too obvious." An ironic comment, considering that Naipaul, also a self-made man of many parts, is now widely considered to be England's greatest living writer. His own faceted history parallels the breakup of colonialism and mass migrations. Of London in the 1950s he says, "I had found myself at the beginning of a great movement of peoples...
...going to get mine.' " If the big-shot investment banker can take what he wants, often by illegal means, then a teenager may think he should be able to grab the spoils in the only way he knows how. Declares Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles: "Our culture accentuates instinct instead of inhibiting...