Word: rueful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...There, amid the fractious squabbling of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, the G.O.P. scored a major sweep. Despite numerous visits and pep talks by Mondale, despite two trips to the state by the President, the voters turned the Democrats out of the governorship and both Senate seats. In a rueful postmortem, a shellshocked Mondale concluded: "I shouldn't have told them to do it for Hubert Humphrey and me, but to do it for themselves...
When known counseling methods fail, the child should be taken from its parents. With a rueful laugh Belisle recalls that when his own daughter was in first grade and the teacher asked what her father did, she replied, "My daddy swipes kids." Separating child from family is always a horrifying and legally difficult matter. "It's like being a member of the Gestapo," says Belisle. "As bad as you know the parents are, there they stand, in the doorway, screaming 'I love my child.' The neighbors gather, whispering and pointing. The mother starts calling you four-letter...
...that he is the best, most entertaining figure anyone has managed to invent for an American movie this year. Moses not only is an amusing variant on the classic lonely guy, private-eye character, but Screenwriter Simon, adapting his own novel, also employs him for purposes of wry and rueful social observation. The well-plotted mystery tale quite compassionately reveals how a lot of '60s radicals have signed on with the System that was once thought to be their enemy, and are uneasily but profitably doing all right as a result...
...were now hanging down until they dangled over the radiator." Perceptions noted, then brushed aside, only to return again, create the underlying rhythm of their days, until Marcia's mental backslide brings a sharper focus. Pym charts the courses of these blameless lives, informing them with a wise, rueful compassion that is all too rare in contemporary fiction...
...autobiography has done its job, and the reader has seen a man intelligent and selfabsorbed, better at action than ideas, somewhat rueful and, by his own testimony, a reasonably decent fellow. The inclination is to accept the judgment. - John Skow