Word: shrewd
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Your review of the Knopf reissue of Miss Cather's A Lost Lady was fine, and I thought a shrewd appraisal of her, except that you took no note of the book's price, $7.95. It bears on a point of some interest to writers now, for the oblivion that swallowed her until now was of her own creation, due to the agreement she made with Alfred Knopf that she was never to be published in cheap editions. Tempus of course fugitted; my The Postman Always Rings Twice appeared in paperback for 250, and the floodgates were opened...
Writer Greenburg is a good-natured humorist whose essays and novels (How to Be a Jewish Mother, Scoring) have demonstrated a shrewd and compassionate eye for the frets and frustrations of middlebrow, middle-class urban America. His first film script is a similarly gentle, knowing throwaway. Director McCarty is careful to make no big deal of it, and his quartet of players is attractively fumble-thumbed in their efforts to have their decorum and shed it too. I Could Never may be the least important - certainly the least pretentious - movie of the year. But it is far from the least...
...marginal player like Pearson (Robert de Niro) will be released if management gets wind of his illness, ends a spring-training holdout by accepting less money than he is worth-if the owners will agree not to cut Bruce. His efforts to keep Bruce's secret from shrewd Skipper Dutch Schnell (Vincent Gardenia), to get the rest of the club to quit ragging a man they don't know is dying, and to encourage Bruce to play above his half-empty head, form the substance of a funny, gentle and honestly sentimental movie that is easily...
...campaign scandals bill that could completely prevent any kind of election hanky-panky from again tainting the American political scene; as we are beginning to see from the Committee's hearings, even the most stringent precautionary regulation of campaign expenditures and contributions can be easily bypassed by a few shrewd men with a laundry bag, cash, and an office wall safe...
Another caveat that could be too easily forgotten: the Soviets have proved to be impressively shrewd traders, eager and able to squeeze the last kopeck out of any transaction with capitalists. That kind of canny negotiating should give pause to the hundreds of U.S. executives who are rushing to do business with Moscow, especially those who want to exploit Siberian natural gas. In that deal, unlike the grain sales, the Soviets will be the sellers in a sellers' market...