Word: scabrous
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...London and biographer of Poet Robert Lowell. When he was sent galleys of J.D. Salinger: A Writing Life, Salinger objected to the extensive use of letters to, among others, Ernest Hemingway and Judge Learned Hand. The correspondence, gathered primarily from university libraries, sometimes shows him at his most scabrous. In one passage cited in the court opinion, a young Salinger vented his anger after Oona O'Neill, whom he had dated, married Charlie Chaplin. "I can see them at home evenings," he wrote. "Chaplin squatting grey and nude, atop his chiffonier, swinging his thyroid around his head by his bamboo...
Director Jerry Zaks makes his intentions plain even before the characters really start talking. From a men's room tucked into the corner of a scabrous press bullpen in a criminal-courts building, out walk a trollop and a policeman adjusting his clothes after what has obviously been a brief but close encounter. Gradually the room fills with journalists who gamble, politicians who steal, gangsters who peddle influence, and an editor who employs leg breakers to circulate his paper. This is a town festering with corruption, and everyone aspires only to scrabble to the top of the dung heap. Life...
...more than 25,000 starving people huddled together last week. Some 210 miles away there was a similar scene of destitution around the 9,000 famished people who crowded into the Quiha camp. Shrouded in a pall of woodsmoke, their new home looked like a medieval battlefield. The parched, scabrous earth was pockmarked with foxholes in which hundreds upon hundreds of families crouched for shelter against the chill mountain wind. The lucky ones had a branch to cover their dugout; others remained exposed to the elements. As soon as a foreign visitor appeared, the emaciated people took...
Markov had been his country's leading novelist and playwright; he had also served a term during the Stalin years, in the Bulgarian Gulag. His prison experiences and literary skills combined to produce the scabrous picture of a nation enslaved. Yet in the eyes of the Bulgarian leadership that was not Markov's worst crime against the state. On Radio Free Europe the defector offered a description of Bulgarian President Todor Zhivkov, a smiling brute on the order of Nikita Khrushchev. At a banquet the author catches the official acting like a Balkan Queen of Hearts, shouting...
...happy tale of Helen Hooven Sant myer is the stuff of literary myth. Her first two novels were ignored in the 1920s. But the lady never lost heart. She planned a stirring rebuttal to Sinclair Lewis' scabrous attacks on Middle America...