Word: piquant
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...sports car, Lamb buys an RV and sets out for a magic summer in quest of the heart of America, minor-league baseball. Writing in the spirit of Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, Lamb forsakes dramatic narrative for an endearing travelogue filled with small piquant details. His odyssey is oddly humbling. He encounters a boyhood hero, Hall of Fame slugger Eddie Matthews, now a sixtyish minor-league batting coach nursing a fearsome hangover and brooding that his young disciples "don't know who I am, what stats I put on the board." Lamb himself, used to sparking conversations with tales...
...sleeping habits here. Eric Lax is no Kitty Kelley; he seems to believe, with Vladimir Nabokov, that "the best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style." With Lax providing a sympathetic ear, Allen tells that story in piquant detail, from his early days writing one-liners for gossip columnists, through his stand-up comedy routines in clubs and on TV, to his present lonely eminence as the crafter of a distinctive, often distinguished body of films...
...Glory is an impressive, meticulously researched work of broadcast history as well as a piquant glimpse inside CBS's corporate culture. Especially poignant is Smith's description of the complex relationship between Paley and Frank Stanton, the longtime president and "conscience" of CBS, who was crushed when Paley cast him aside rather than accept him as successor. It was a pattern that would be repeated with one heir apparent after another. By the end of his reign, Smith says bluntly, Paley, well into his 80s, "had become an albatross for the network...
John Bartholomew Tucker wins the prize for the year's best mystery title: He's Dead -- She's Dead: Details at Eleven (St. Martin's Press; 312 pages; $17.95). The puzzler that follows is just as piquant. Jim Sasser, onetime TV commentator and now a writer of thrillers, stops by the network to see an old Vietnam war buddy. He is not a happy camper. Cost cutting is under way, firings are the order of the day, and a terrorist is threatening to do some eliminating of his own. For a lark, Sasser decides to probe, just...
...reporters do is get the news. The next thing, usually, is to round up a few experts to say what it all means. Too often, what gets experts quoted -- and called again the next time news relates to their specialty -- is not specific knowledge of a case but crisp, piquant opinion. The expert enjoys the publicity; the journalist enlivens a story. The losers are the public, who get ill-informed speculation masquerading as analysis, and the news subjects, who are assessed in intimate, knowing terms by strangers...