Word: newmans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...wins," assistant coach Paula Newman said yesterday, adding, "We just didn't get the second and third place finishes we needed...
...Nora. Bill Foley, as Peter Flynn, says his lines as though reading them for the first time. Maire O'Neil, as the prostitute Rosie, makes immediate some of O'Casey's profoundest lines, his true revolutionary credo of communism--but her characterization slips occasionally into caricature. Still, Angela Newman, as Mrs. Gogan, manages to build a comprehensible and psychologically real persona, and Cyril Cusack, as Fluther Good, deftly plays on the entire keyboard of emotion, from deadpan humor to quiet bravery...
...guide through this gallery of horrors, Newman tries to keep everybody's spirits up with wisecracks. His chapter headings give the flavor: "A One-Way Streetcar Named Detente," "Ize Front," "Paradigm Lost." But the charm of persistent jokiness begins to pall long before the tour is over...
...that matter, so do the horrors. They are too much of a bad thing. The reader soon longs for Newman to interrupt with some sustained comment and analysis. What generalizations he does provide are unexceptionable but also unexceptional ("We are all safer when language is specific. It improves our chances of knowing what is going on"). In his 207 pages, there is scarcely as much intellectual substance as George Orwell offers in the 15 pages of his celebrated 1946 essay Politics and the English Language...
...other hand, Newman, instinctively a popularizer, does not want to risk losing his audience. (Nothing clears the room faster than a whiff of intellectual substance.) Already, he notes, he is viewed in some quarters as "cranky and pedantic." Since his cause is crucial, and the need for converts great, perhaps he is right to be content with taking a different risk: that A Civil Tongue, as it follows Strictly Speaking on the bestseller lists, will be found merely entertaining by the people it ought to Sting. Christopher Porterfield