Word: midwesterner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Breaks does have the occasional (and perhaps inevitable) excess, the overripe prose, the gimpy metaphor, the Jabbar-sized sentence. An example: "Indeed, Paxson, who was white, looked like the star of a new television sit-com about a healthy happy-go lucky midwestern college student who was always trying to borrow his parents' car and getting into trouble, but the kind of trouble that is easily rectified. (That is, no hard drugs.)" The book definitely suffers, too, for its lack of photographs, which would have helped in keeping the many names straight...
...with a primitive anthropology that explained why. The easiest convert was the old gunslinger himself--the untested theories gave presidential candidate Ronald Reagan more ground than the traditional hymns to patriotism and loyalty allowed him to stand on. But the most coveted was a young congressman from Michigan, a midwestern farmboy with strong sensibilities for justice and equity a college radical from the 60s whose ideological fervor refused to mellow into complacence but vented itself on the task of finding new solutions to the old problems...
...Jesse James (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Fonda is virtually cornered into renegade political activism; a corrupt System flays him, but under the vulnerable Midwestern skin is a species of American hero. In his best comedy, The Lady Eve (1941), Fonda is the perfect patsy for a con woman, Barbara Stanwyck?so perfect that she falls in love with the sap. Watching Fonda writhe under Stanwyck's bogus endearments remains one of the high delights of screwball farce...
...Administration was against the dairy and grain subsidy increases. But representatives from Midwestern farm states were defiant, partly because the White House had earlier agreed to maintain subsidies on sugar, peanuts and tobacco as a way of gaining Southern Democratic votes for its economic package. In fact, resentment over those deals led to a breakdown of the traditional backscratching among Southern and Midwestern Representatives. After winning their grain and dairy supports, most Midwesterners joined other Congressmen to defeat a package of sugar and peanut programs that had been passed by the Senate. Caught between principles and promises, the Administration stood...
Fans will still find enough vestiges of the former Reinhart: his sententious liberalism is undiminished; his antique Midwestern vocabulary ("hen fruit," "on the fritz") is intact; and if his optimism is a bit white at the temples, it still goads him on. But Reinhart ultimately comes to believe that life's meaning can be boiled down to the profound couplet: "Nothin' says lovin'/ Like something from the oven." The transformation has affected his creator as well. The tortuous and arcane language Berger displayed in Neighbors has been effectively streamlined. It now breaks for self-examination...