Word: penchant
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HANDCARVED COFFINS" is a true story about a murderer, a detective and a writer. Truman Capote calls it "A Non-Fiction Account of an American Crime," putting it in a class with In Cold Blood. Again, Capote explores the American penchant for evil. But so simple is his tone and so macabre his tale that this short work seems colder and bloodier than his earlier account of multiple murders in the New West. With In Cold Blood, Capote invented a genre; 15 years later, he has whittled a tiny literary headstone for the remains of American innocence...
...dares to deflate poet-turned-ideologue Adrienne Rich, who's always screeching things like, "It's the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the father in us is only a hack." Harrison diagnoses in Rich a "fossilized moral imagination," parochialism, whining, polemicism, and a penchant for boring the reader. She says "the tender conscience and the tough mind alike are confounded by this diatribe." Making a plea for intellectual generosity and open-mindedness, Rich's rhetoric leaves no room for a more complex truth. It's refreshing to hear one feminist speak of another with...
While the National Security Adviser cannot be blamed for the recent misfortunes that have befallen the U.S. or for the President's own failures of leadership, Brzezinski is personally responsible for exacerbating institutional tensions within the Government, needlessly agitating foreign leaders with his penchant for braggadocio, and sowing confusion with pronouncements that too often sound like geostrategic gobbledygook. Thus he has contributed to the impression so widespread at home and abroad of an Administration that is impetuous and in disarray. In that sense, Brzezinski is unquestionably part of Carter's overall political problem, now as the President faces...
...star of the campaign because of his Lincolnesque calm and restraint. In 1972 he was considered the Democratic front runner, but he stumbled fatally while campaigning for the New Hampshire primary. Outraged by a charge in the arch-conservative Manchester, N.H., Union Leader that his wife Jane had a penchant for cocktails, Muskie stood in front of the newspaper office in a snowstorm to denounce Publisher William Loeb: "That man doesn't walk, he crawls." The Senator choked up and tears rolled down his cheeks. He claimed he was not weeping, but the damage was done. "It cast...
...zealot for far-right causes. He is on the national council of the John Birch Society and is said to have angrily quit the University of Texas after one semester because one of his professors suggested that the Government should control all natural resources. Like H.L., Bunker has a penchant for controversy; he is almost constantly enmeshed in lawsuits. In 1975 Bunker and his brother Herbert were tried in federal court on charges of Bunker's having tapped the phones of their father's business associates. The brothers protested that they had not known wiretapping was illegal and were acquitted...