Word: shrewd
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Carnegie (1835-1919), the son of a master weaver in Dunfermline, Scotland, saw his boyhood paradise torn asunder when his father's skills were rendered obsolete by the power loom. The Carnegies had to emigrate to the foul Pittsburgh, Pa., slums when Andrew was 12. Quick-witted, shrewd and resilient, he survived a Dickensian adolescence that included working as a bobbin boy in a textile mill...
After the war television was unleashed. As a shrewd businessman who mixed as easily with scientists as with corporate leaders, Sarnoff fought for patents and the right to advance the technology of the medium. Called ruthless by his rivals, he once said, "Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in men." And when others would complain that his focus was more on technology than on programming, he said, "Basically, we're the delivery boys...
Reduced to living in his studio and eating cold beans out of a can, Disney endured the hard times any worthwhile success story demands. It was not until he moved to Los Angeles and partnered with his shrewd and kindly older brother Roy, who took care of business for him, that he began to prosper modestly. Even so, his first commercially viable creation, Oswald the Rabbit, was stolen from him. That, naturally, reinforced his impulse to control. It also opened the way for the mouse that soared. Cocky, and in his earliest incarnations sometimes cruelly mischievous but always an inventive...
...real Elizabeth is certainly an enduringmystery: a shrewd political creature who used herambiguous position as a woman to lead her countryinto prominence. If only Elizabeth's choices andactions in the film were more her own, one couldcelebrate the achievements of this remarkablefigure. But instead the film presents Elizabeth'sreign as the results of the actions and failingsof the men around her. She refuses to marry not soshe can better exploit her eligibility as awildcard in international affairs but because herchoices are a sterile marriage of convenience withSpain or shallow wedlock with a Frenchtransvestite. She denounces sex not to reign moreeffectively...
...that's exactly the problem with Elizabeth. When the film thrusts the young thing into a den of wolves as savage and wily as the Mafia barons of The Godfather or the Japanese businessmen of Rising Sun, it wrings its hands somewhat too emphatically at Elizabeth's shrewd, momentous steps to transfigure herself into an emblem to lead her country. If Elizabeth's mutation into the Virgin Queen is the death of her womanhood, and happiness, as the film asserts, her sexuality--that which she renounces to rule the nation--ought to seem a little more respectable...