Word: shrewd
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Grayhaired Doxiadis was dapper, shrewd and brisk-a silver fox of a man who was equally at home designing mud-brick houses for Zambian peasants or diagramming his thoughts (with multicolored felt-tip pens) for Western intellectuals. He was born in 1913 of Greek parents in Bulgaria, was bred and educated in Athens, and earned a graduate degree in Berlin. His talent shone early: at 23 he became Athens' top town planner; at 25 he was chief of regional planning for all Greece. Then came World War II (Doxiadis was a Resistance hero) and after...
William Larsen is a shrewd Doc Gibbs, and makes the first act's most touching moment--in which he gently chides his son for allowing Mother Gibbs to chop the wood--a memorable vignette. Eileen Heckart, with her always expressive face, is a dotingly solicitous Mother Gibbs, and is carefully to speak of her husband's hobby as the Civil Waw. Lee Richardson and Geraldine Fitzgerald, as Mr. and Mrs. Webb, are all right but not outstanding...
...King's greatest asset is a flair for thinking-and acting-big. With Ali demanding prize money beyond the means of individuals or even corporations, King has made his deals with governments. Shrewd enough to realize that championship bouts featuring Ali are the kind of promotion that developing nations like to stage, King has courted heads of state in Cairo, Tehran, Lusaka (Zambia), Manila and Kuala Lumpur. "The jet lag is so bad," he says, "I eat breakfast 24 hours...
Died. Marion Frankfurter, 84, wife of the late Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and a shrewd judge of issues and personalities in her own right; in a Washington, D.C., nursing home. A witty, no-nonsense Massachusetts girl, Marion Frankfurter was the editor of many of her husband's nonjudicial writings. Never shy about deflating the sometimes pedantic and opinionated Justice when circumstances seemed to call for it, she once cracked that "there are only two things wrong with Felix's speeches: he digresses and he returns to the subject." Crippled with arthritis and in need of constant, expensive...
...homogenized age it is hard to realize how great seemed the differences between the colonies, how long were those miles that we now cover in an hour by air. Differences had accumulated as the population spread out and as the colonial decades wore on. In 1760 the shrewd Benjamin Franklin (experienced in trying to bring colonies together) said that even if, in the "impossible" event of "grievous tyranny and oppression," a few colonies should somehow ever come together, "those colonies that did not join the rebellion, would join the mother country in suppressing it." As John Adams recalled, "the colonies...