Word: propped
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Bill Clinton? Not on your life. I'm talking about Rutherford B. Hayes, a President brushed aside by history and used as the prop of a thousand Washington toastmasters searching for a cheap laugh over the past 120 years. Humorist Bob Orben says the name is melodic ("Chester Arthur doesn't make it"), and Hayes' dim place in the national chronicle makes him fodder for almost any joke. Washington visitor at the Hayes Inauguration in 1877: "Who was that man in front of you on the stand with his hand raised?" Senator: "I didn't catch his name...
...racial preferences is so intense it "seeps out of every pore" had registered his consulting firm as a black-owned business in order to keep state contracts worth more than $1 million (he says a state law compelled him to do so). And I found it wryly amusing that Prop 209's organizers picked Connerly as field marshal of their war on race consciousness precisely because of his race. The right-wing ideologues who crafted the California Civil Rights Initiative knew it was doomed if only resentful white guys seemed to support it. So they aggressively recruited Connerly...
...Mosley's other novels, the plot is mostly incidental, a prop for his rich characterizations and astute social observations. In Fishin', Easy emerges as an Everyman of the segregated pre-World War II rural South: semiliterate, marginally employed, the victim of numerous acts of offhand racism. He inhabits a blues-toned, all-black world of juke joints, odd jobs and broken people wrestling with the same dilemma: "If all you got is two po'k chops an' ten chirren, what you gonna do?" The answer: improvise and live with the consequences...
...joins the great black migration to Los Angeles, fights in World War II and struggles to find a place of dignity for himself in a society that maintains, at best, only grudging respect for African Americans." As in Mosley's other novels, the plot is mostly incidental, a prop for his rich characterizations and astute social observations. "In his renderings of a black preacher?s rolling sermon or the colorful chit-chat among the locals in a general store, Mosley displays a pitch-perfect gift for capturing the cadences of black speech that rivals the dialogue in Ralph Ellison...
...party at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. And no wonder. Squat, garishly silver and with photos that look more like they were taken for a home photo album than an architectural manifesto, it's designed to be dipped into, flicked through and maybe even used to prop open a door. In short, a visual delight...