Word: lent
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Until a decade or so ago, what was considered good modern design in America was not American at all. It was the International Style, promulgated mostly by Weimar Germany's Bauhaus: sleek, austere functionalism that lent an impersonal, industrialized finish to everything from skyscrapers to fountain pens. Increasingly, however, we are realizing that the design that has most consistently appealed to us all along-buildings like Eero Saarinen's main terminal at Dulles International Airport, furnishings like the Eames lounge chair-had its genesis not in Weimar but in a relatively little-known school of art and design...
...CAPABLE narrator but a puzzling novelist; it seems his sensibility is more mature than his technique. For a novel which takes as its theme vicissitude and secular vanity. Kundera uses surprisingly little imagery of change, transformation, and decay. The narrator is highly intelligent; but his intelligence is not fully lent to any of the characters. Their dialogue is not as witty or engaging as the narrator's, we are never told how everyone in the novel became conscious of lightness. Unreasonably, no one who makes religious or metaphysical assumptions is allowed on stage; one gets the feeling that Kundera...
...report claimed that the chancellor solicited loans from District 4 employees "in a manner that was inherently coercive and frequently deceptive." His former secretary complained that she had made several loans to the chancellor, but had not been repaid. More damaging, investigators found that the eight school employees who lent Alvarado money had received a total of at least $65,000 in overtime pay in 1982 and 1983. They had in fact worked the hours, but most of the overtime earned was above the school district's average. To all this, Alvarado answered, "I never used public funds...
...June 1, 1982, aboard Air Force One en route to Europe for a ten-day diplomatic visit, President Reagan broke his reading glasses. I lent him a pair of my own, and he discovered that he could see perfectly well with them. "That proves it, Mr. President-we have the same vision." We laughed, but by the end of the trip I saw with final clarity that however similar our views might be on certain issues, we were hopelessly divided on others, and the confident personal relationship that might have bridged this difference would always be denied to Reagan...
...virtually every line is soaked with relevance and insight. The spareness of El Norte's storyline never lapses into maudlin simplicity; on the contrary, it only fosters depth. The straightforward courage of its central figures (ingenuously portrayed by unknown actors) accentuates the tragedy of their fates. "All things are lent to us," Rosa chants at her father's funeral, an astonishingly forgiving utterance, given the circumstances. But it is precisely such humility and understatement that imbues the story with disturbing conviction...