Word: savoir
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Times, leaders and heroes change. John F. Kennedy was a fan of superspy James Bond's savoir faire and flashy victories over cold war bad guys. It seems somehow fitting that Bill Clinton's favorite literary do-gooder is Easy Rawlins, a savvy, down-to-earth African-American private eye based in Los Angeles. In WHITE BUTTERFLY (Norton; $19.95), the third book in the Rawlins series, good-time girls, corrupt politicians, trigger-happy psychopaths and other crime-novel fixtures are all in place. But Walter Mosley's writing hums with the particular rhythms and blues of the black American experience...
Despite his acknowledged savoir faire, as the 63-year-old economist ends his second, and he hopes last, tour of duty in University Hall, he says this past year has not been without its difficulties. They are the difficulties, one might say, of one who knows too much...
...they believe, Mikhail Gorbachev's political savoir-faire and the imminent collapse of communism will give them the money to further inflate the Great Society programs of the 1960s and 70s. They are convinced that anti-communist, anti-government conservatism has lost its appeal in the changing world...
November brings Oliver and Company, a dog-and-cat, Oliver Twist-inspired musical set in New York City. The animals speak with the voices of such stars as Billy Joel, who plays a jivy artful dodger (sample line: "Consider it a free lesson in street savoir faire from New York's coolest quadruped"), and Cheech Marin, who plays a Chihuahua named Tito. Says George Scribner, the film's director: "We don't write down to children. They're generally way ahead...
...financial world's most important "non-institutions," as one representative called it. The club has no official charter, no staff of its own or even a permanent headquarters. It works by a set of unwritten rules and owes much of its significance to the refined negotiating skills and political savoir faire of a succession of French Finance Ministry officials who, in the words of former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency John Heimann, "have rolled over a vast amount of Third World debt with a minimum of fuss...