Word: lifeless
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Less evident is the damage to the desert. Although many think of it as a lifeless place, the desert is actually a teeming, though fragile, ecosystem. Home to a variety of spiders, snakes and scorpions as well as larger creatures like camels, sheep and gazelles, it is literally held together by microorganisms, which form a thin surface crust. This crust catches the seeds of sparse shrubs and prevents surface soil from blowing away. Once it is disturbed -- by the maneuvers of a million soldiers, say -- recovery can take decades. The Libyan desert still shows tank tracks laid down in World...
This oddly lifeless gossip novel by Michael Korda, a publishing exec whose works include the yuppie missals Success! and Power!, is the sort called a roman a clef by the French and "serving up something for the shopgirls" by the English. There is a patronizing quality to the central notion, which is that the reader is a lowbrow who will have naughty fun -- "coo, oi didn't know that about 'er" -- guessing which real-life celebrities are behaving scandalously behind aliases and sketchy disguises...
...robbed of the opportunity to discuss, in an academic setting, the works of the very predecessors they hope to emulate. Graduating American "intellectuals" who have not debated the relative merits of their own literature is problematic at best. The literature they produce is in danger of being redundant and lifeless, steeped in a foreign tradition and removed from the reality of national life...
Plagiarism at least proclaims that some written words are valuable enough to steal. If the language is magnificent, the sin is comprehensible: the plagiarist could not resist. But what if the borrowed stuff is a flat, lifeless mess -- the road kill of passing ideas? In that case there is less risk, but surely no joy at all. (Does the plagiarist ever feel joy?) Safer to steal the duller stones. None but the dreariest specialists will remember them or sift for them in the muck...
...male character with the least direction is Harold. Spraggins is lost and lifeless in this subtle and demanding role. He is almost uniformly unbelievable, his delivery heavy handed and poorly timed, especially in scenes with Forbes alone...