Word: luridness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tactics used by Bush's strategists to brand Michael Dukakis a gooey liberal out of touch with mainstream values, none worked better than the relentless pounding of Horton's horrible tale. By the end of the campaign, scarcely a voter had not been exposed to the lurid details of the rapacious spree Horton committed while on weekend furlough from the Massachusetts prison to which he had been sentenced to life without parole for a brutal 1974 homicide...
...Hawaii, falls into the morbid subbranch of literature that Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed pathography. As such, it is a book with notable flaws. Seagrave, whose previous works include a biography of China's legendary Soong sisters, writes with glum prosecutorial fury, treating as credible any rumor of lurid conduct -- Imelda's alleged lesbian orgies, for example -- that helps his cause. When venturing into broader areas, like Washington's postwar foreign policy in the Far East, the author lapses into a crude historical revisionism, rejecting as paranoiac fancy any suggestion that leftist + insurgencies along the Pacific Rim might have been...
...practices being prevented--such as the grinding up of baby chicks--are not even used in the state and haven't been for several decades. They are included mainly for their shock value, in hopes of provoking a visceral rather than reasoned response to this problem through lurid distortions...
...real-life crime, moreover, has the whiff of pandering. The correspondents on 60 Minutes have been called prosecutorial, but they at least come armed with sheaves of evidence. The hot-button journalists of The Reporters and other tabloid shows pursue their prey with little more than inflammatory narration and lurid "re- creations" of the crime. The appeal is to knee-jerk emotions, fears and fantasies of revenge...
First we looked outward, seeking the echoes of Boston's nautical past, the echoes of wharves and whalers, ships in port and those out to sea. But it was the motorcycles--rusty and lurid--just below us in the choppy waters of the Harbor, which captured our gaze...