Word: mannered
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What he's reluctant to say is that he dispensed with the partisan and sometimes imperious manner of past Denver mayors to accomplish quite a bit during his brief tenure. When Hickenlooper, who is called Mayor Hick, took office in July 2003, he inherited a $70 million budget deficit, the worst in city history. He eliminated the shortfall without major service cuts or layoffs, convincing city employees that they should accept less pay and instituting mandatory leave days (he slashed his salary 25%). Bucking the wisdom that you don't take on city-hall unions, he pushed for an incentive...
Savage Grace, a deadpan chronicle of this cesspool of a household, is presented as a collage of documents and reminiscences, in the manner of the 1982 best seller Edie, another glimpse of self-destruction among the elite. The mélange is repetitive yet oddly incomplete, particularly about the family's finances. The absence of a sustained narrative and the mixed-up chronology demand a slow, close reading. There is no attempt at redeeming social importance, and one wonders why Brooks Baekeland and other central characters allowed such an invasion of privacy. Still, the story is evoked with arresting detail...
...lubricant of booze. At one bar, a fellow drinker confides that his wife is pregnant and his salary insufficient to support a child. Ultimately, Morley is invited to sleep off the hours before daybreak at this man's apartment. At breakfast the next morning, the host's confessional manner has vanished: "Sober now, restored to the real world, he probably felt ashamed...
Kimball had only a modest business career in Arizona before he became an apostle in 1943. His self-effacing manner and sieges of heart trouble and cancer led many to believe that he would be a caretaker President. Instead, he proved to be an energetic activist who toured 85 nations and spurred the international growth of the most successful religion ever born in the U.S. He was the first to put Asians and Latin Americans into Mormonism's top ranks, and permitted leaders of foreign jurisdictions to live overseas rather than in Salt Lake City...
Inevitably, Walter's return to the scenes of old cold war crimes evokes the mood and manner of '60s pop spy epics like, say, The Ipcress File. But Director Penn, whose most successful works in that period were counterculture icons like Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man, is not about to be nostalgic about his former competition. Target is a deadpan satire on the old cloak-and-dagger conventions almost to the end, at which point Penn cannot resist staging with self-conscious luridness a scene in which Walter must deal with a particularly sadistic bomb threat...