Word: owlish
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...trash to be pigeonholed. If salt-soaked comparison is required, O'Brian's adventures suggest Joseph Conrad's sea tales more than those of C.S. Forester and his Horatio Hornblower. Conrad's prevailing mood is darker; though O'Brian can summon darkness and defeat, he is more arch and owlish. But as Forester did, O'Brian novelizes serially. The precarious lives of two memorable characters, friends and shipmates, thread through his books...
Exactly two decades ago as the knees stiffen, but a gnat's eyeblink in geologic time, a writer for the New Yorker hit on a notion for a Talk of the Town piece, one of those short, graceful, somewhat owlish essays that in those days were told with a royally editorial "we." John McPhee's excellent idea was to collar a geologist friend, visit the rock walls of a recent highway cut not far from Manhattan and relate what the newly naked stone told the geologist...
DIED. VIRGILIO BARCO, 75, Colombian President whose social reforms were undercut by his unrelenting war against cocaine barons; of stomach cancer; in Bogota. A former mayor, the owlish-eyed, professorial Barco stammered his way to the presidential palace in 1986. With neither flair nor fanfare, he hunkered down to combat poverty and drugs until his administration was overrun by vengeful cartels...
George Washington's Cows, written and illustrated by David Small (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $15), reveals in owlish, bumpety-bump verse and vivid drawings why the great man entered politics: because his livestock drove him goobers. His cows insisted on wearing lavender gowns and being sprayed with cologne (which was quite expensive); his pigs wore wigs and served dinner to guests at Mount Vernon (very nicely too, but still ); and his sheep wore academic gowns and delivered lectures. They "measured the sea with a stick./ Then, raising their hoofs in triumph, they cried:/ 'We say with a certain amount of pride...
...With his owlish gaze, lithe step and limber tongue, Antonio Lacayo Oyanguren looks and acts like the Jesuit-trained postgraduate of M.I.T. that he is. For most of his 45 years, he has labored in profitable obscurity. During nearly 11 years of rule by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, Lacayo, the son of one wealthy family who married into another, tended to business, leaving Nicaragua's treacherous politics to others...