Word: leaven
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...helped shape the interventionist policies that dominated the Kennedy and Johnson years. He has never lost his taste for mixing it up in the public economic debate. An engaging speaker, he is also one of the few economists who can write good English. His popular essays and book reviews leaven economic analysis with a dry, cutting wit. "Only someone with a sense of humor could survive reading this book," he began a review of George Gilder's The Entrepreneur as Hero in the New Republic. "And no one with any trace of a sense of humor could have written...
Irony serves to sharpen, and humor leaven, the mishaps that befall the book's eccentric families. Unrelentingly bleak, however, are the descriptions of cruelty to children, which are a hallmark of Gallant's stories in Home Truths. Indeed, with a mother like the matriarch in Saturday, there is no need to blame family tensions on Canada's ethnic problems. "She told each of her five daughters as they grew up that they were conceived in horror; that she could have left them in their hospital cots and not looked back, so sickened was she by their limp spines...