Word: shrewd
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...Palmach was renowned. In Syria his job was to slither up telephone poles and cut the wires so the pro-Nazi forces of Vichy France could not send for reinforcements. By 1944 he had been promoted to deputy battalion commander and had developed such a reputation as a shrewd military strategist that senior officers regularly sought his advice or opinions...
...this he blames shrewd foreign competitors and American free traders, a message especially potent with displaced workers. He recently attended a rally in western Pennsylvania, where his mother was born and where his cousins still live. He remembers it as a thriving manufacturing region. And it is all disappearing. "We allowed those other countries to take over American industries: TVs, radios, motorcycles, cars. We gotta wake up and look these guys in the eye and say, Look, these are not like our golf partners. These people are rivals, competitors and, in the case of China, potential mighty adversaries. We have...
...morale and lax discipline cropped up with increasing frequency. Inept officers were drinking when they should have been training their troops, a Serb militia leader told a New York Times reporter last week; the soldiers, he said, were "too stupid to stop an attack by Boy Scouts." Stupid or shrewd, many also saw little point in fighting for territory that the negotiators might soon take from them anyway...
...friends are assertive and stylish. They blend tales, jokes, and bold assertions, ranging from shrewd to superstitious, more for entertainment than edification. Whatever boredom and immobility they feel in their lives--stuck in the cramped and cobbled lots of urban Pittsburgh (elaborately and meticulously rendered by set designer Scott Bradley)--they don't complain about it to each other...
Which sets the reader to musing: by rough calculation, there are about three decades of imprudence and dusty commotion to get through before they become the leathery, intermittently shrewd men of Lonesome Dove. The prequel hasn't really completed its job. Obviously a postprequel or two is required before the central novel can decently begin. Buffalo Hump still lurks. McCrae seems about to marry, though surely not if the sly heartbreaker in the general store is thinking clearly. And the great-grandlitters of pigs not yet born and rattlers not yet hatched must colonize the town of Lonesome Dove...