Word: lowdownness
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...Lowdown: When confronted with massive challenges - and forming a "hemispheric partnership" certainly qualifies - it helps to frame prescribed policy changes in terms of sheer self-interest. This report does so deftly, mostly eschewing wonkiness in favor of stressing common bonds. Its series of "modest, pragmatic recommendations" are couched to show that the U.S. and Latin America are natural bedfellows. It's not that we have a moral obligation to turn the other cheek when Hugo Chavez dubs George Bush a "devil," or when pockets of America inaccurately assign blame for U.S. unemployment levels on Latin migrants. It's that doing...
...Lowdown Any reader knows he's in trouble when the author finds it necessary to earnestly overexplain the book's title. Shadows at Dawn, in this case, is meant to refer not only to the hour the massacre took place but to the "murky, often elusive nature of historical truth," while "Borderlands" refers both to the contested area separating the U.S. and Mexico and also to the demarcation between "history and storytelling...
...Lowdown: As rambling and leisurely as a walk through the English countryside, Nicholson's cultural history is confident in its lack of consequence. Essentially a collection of anecdotes, The Lost Art of Walking is buttressed by the sheer fun of said anecdotes - lists of walking-themed popular tunes and miniprofiles of the stroll-obsessed. It's a fruitful topic: walking is so essential to daily life that one can connect the act to almost every and any historical event or human endeavor - battles, expeditions, feats of endurance, or plain old human evolution as we move from crouched primates to upright...
...Lowdown: This report is not for the faint of heart - and not just because of its length. It serves as a grim reminder that sometimes a soldier's greatest enemy is the government he or she is fighting for. As the panel notes, it took nearly 20 years before the U.S. admitted that its use of Agent Orange had adversely affected soldiers during Vietnam, and it's taken just as long for Gulf War veterans to get GWI recognized as an actual medical condition. As the report's authors state, "addressing the serious and persistent health problems that affect Gulf...
...Lowdown: It's a tall order, holding up a film that was generally dismissed by initial audiences and hailing it as one of the most influential works of our time. But to his credit, Tucker avoids preaching to the choir or trying to win over skeptics. His mission is not to defend the worthiness of Scarface but to establish the boundaries of this drug opus' lasting and profound influence. As a historian, Tucker is fair, acknowledging the film's many faults and the gradual emergence of a vast, underground fan base. And he spends a good many chapters detailing...