Word: pettiest
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Douglas MacArthur is one of the major embarrassments of American history. On one hand he was, without quibble or question, a military genius of the rank of Alexander, Hannibal and Napoleon. On the other hand, as this flawed but fascinating biography makes clear, he could be one of the pettiest and most arrogant men ever to have worn the uniform of the U.S. Army...
...particular Augean stable that 9to5 organizers have taken on, the muck lies deep. Change is slow in coming. The winner of 9to5's "Pettiest Office Procedures Contest" last fall was a man who had his secretary sew up a rip in the seat of his pants while he was in them. ("Men's egos are bigger today," he later explained to The Boston Globe. "Men want that little bit of security that a good secretary provides.") Second prize went to a store manager who asked his clerks to dress up as bumble bees to attract customers into his store...
...more frightening than any sudden gunshot--it's more frightening when the unexpected body you discover is live. The ferris wheel in the Prater will never stop turning--Reed films it from the crazy angles that were Orson Welles' trademark; it is here that he reveals that even the pettiest racketeer has a philosophical motive--and an attractive one at that--for his crimes...
...should the reader of this book. Only Amis' talent as a storyteller and stylist keeps Girl, 20 from settling into the pettiest smugness. But then, an Amis novel has always been like a naughty jaunt on a thinly iced pond. Too much moral or critical weight concentrated in any one place means breaking through to the shallows beneath the surface...
...from Marguerite Duras' simultaneously luminous and opaque play, A Place Without Doors, which is having its U.S. premiere at New Haven's Long Wharf Theater. Another tentative meaning might be that life is a mystery on a scale that reduces the solution of a murder to the pettiest of puzzles. Since Marguerite Duras is a French novelist and a scenarist (Hiroshima, Mon Amour), still another specifically Gallic meaning to be drawn from her play is that the heart has its reasons that reason knows...