Word: penchants
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ironically, the series' greatest flaw is a result of its principal asset: Miller's agile mind. The host's penchant for explaining everything in terms of something else-gunpowder to show how nerves fire muscles into contraction; cartography to demonstrate the differences between organs and tissues-can be instructive. But analogies are used so lavishly that audiences may be subject to acute metaphoritis. The going occasionally gets so dense that the viewer is tempted to cry: "Give it to me straight, Doc. I can take...
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...