Word: shrewd
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Senescent Saint "Tell me, do you think your old man has slipped his trolley-that he belongs in a laughing academy?" The old man is Joseph P. Kotcher. the academy is an old folks home, and the question is rhetorical. In Kotch, Walter Matthau plays a septuagenarian of shrewd independence; he has no intention of fading slowly into the sunset years. Because, among other offenses, he leaves the toilet seat up, Kotcher is eased out of his son's bickering household in Los Angeles and takes off for the Northwest, sightseeing and being lovable. Mostly being lovable. Wiping children...
...Soviet monolith to an unperson. To Russia's masses, his performance was at best ambiguous. Heralded for relaxing the prison-camp atmosphere that prevailed under Stalin, he was also bitterly blamed for recurring failures in the economy and agriculture. To most Westerners, too, his record is mixed. A shrewd man who carefully preserved his peasant touch, an unabashed ham who pounded his shoe on a desk at the United Nations in 1960, he was the first Soviet ruler to admit a touch of humanism into Communism, and a leading proponent of peaceful coexistence between East and West...
...Revel France's answer to Charles Reich-a 1971 champion of the sweeping statement? Not quite. Beneath the extravagances he is a shrewd polemicist out to score a fair rebuttal point: that America is not as bad as most Europeans-and many Americans-think it is. In other words, the New World is still a source of revolutionary hope. But the modern sin of overstatement runs away with Revel. Before he can stop, he is dreaming of a revolution that will spread from the U.S. by "a sort of political osmosis" until it arrives at its logical conclusion: "world...
...Vietnamese refer to Ellsworth Bunker as the "blue-eyed sorcerer" or "the icebox." In their view, the American ambassador is shrewd, cool and manipulative, a match for the wiliest Vietnamese politician. He seems, in a word, inscrutable-so much so that a great many Vietnamese believe that Bunker, acting on Richard Nixon's behalf, eased Big Minh and Nguyen Cao Ky out of the presidential race. After all these years, they still do not understand the Yankee gentleman from Yale...
...come to an understanding with the father he hardly knows, and this father, Versilov, has already passed beyond all "ideas" into a kind of religion of despair. The son is what many of us once were: passionate, deluded, selfish, idealistic. The father is what many of us will become: shrewd, equivocal, weary, compassionate. Father and son argue, they fight, they even compete over the same woman (neither one succeeding), and finally they are reconciled...