Word: mordant
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...most controversial is 101 Uses for a Dead Cat (Clarkson N. Potter, $2.95), which has sold 600,000 copies since publication last April and has headed the trade paperback bestseller list for twelve straight weeks. It is a collection of mordant and often macabre cartoons by English Artist Simon Bond, who is violently allergic to living cats but has no end of ingenious notions for recycling cadavers. The Charles Addams of ailurophobia, he sees deceased tabbies as admirable substitutes for more conventional objects ranging from anchors to wine holders (not to mention cat's cradles...
From this nonsense emerges an eerie, seductive thriller that works equally as a mordant police procedural, an occult horror story and an ambivalent look at aborigines fighting for tradition in the technological age. Dialogue is cynical and the cast beguilingly quirky, notably Albert Finney as a detective and Gregory Hines as a manic, mock-suave coroner. Visual effects evoke for the audience the heightened senses of a preternatural predator...
...Veterans Experience Theater Company in New York City. T.J. Anderson, Fletcher Professor of Music at Tufts University, is working on an opera called Soldier Boy, Soldier, about the readjustment problems of a black Viet Nam vet. A San Francisco veteran named Tad Foster has come forth with a mordant collection of cartoons called The Viet Nam Funny Book. The Viet Nam War is even, finally, good for laughs...
Throughout, Galbraith is as laconic as an Ontario plow jockey. He offers little about his private life; his wit is a bit too mechanical, as are mordant observations like "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." Yet Galbraith's air of detachment is satisfying. It enables him to place himself in recent history without seeming more or less important than he was. He is one of the few contemporary memoirists who have held the line on inflation...
...observes Biographer William McFeely with mordant pragmatism, "is a way out of a leather store." Certainly it was that for Ulysses S. Grant, who was clerking in a family shop in Galena, Ill., when the Civil War ignited the U.S. Grant was 38 when the rebels fired on Fort Sumter, and he had distinguished himself only briefly as a soldier: in combat, as an eager young West Pointer in the Mexican War, and as an enterprising peacetime quartermaster who led a hapless party of California-bound travelers across the Isthmus of Panama...