Word: shrewdness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...league lawyer in the oval office, brilliant political practitioner, champion of better education for poor black children, husband of a woman who broke precedent and bravely crusaded nationally on one of the great social issues of the day, voracious book reader, shrewd observer who identified a massive shift in the U.S. economy and the job skills required to meet it, partisan of women's rights, winner of a knock-down, drag-out battle with a Congress that attempted to shut down the government and humiliate the President...
...movie. And since licensing in the mid-'70s wasn't the huge profit center for studios it is today--Star Wars helped create that too--Lucas' deal was arguably even more farsighted than the resulting film. Today he is as much a businessman as he is a filmmaker: his shrewd skill in reinvesting his profits (among other things, he owns Industrial Light & Magic, the premier special-effects house, and LucasArts, one of the nation's top four cd-rom makers) has enabled him to become sole owner of what is essentially his own ministudio. "I think what drives...
...that Ovitz, co-founder of powerful Creative Artists Agency, would find himself out of his depth. Over the years, he had built a reputation as a shrewd, tough, almost omniscient leader. Besides representing an enviable list of major clients--Tom Cruise, Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty--he ranged far beyond the traditional agent's role. He played a part in brokering Sony's acquisition of Columbia Pictures in 1989 and shepherded Matsushita into its purchase of MCA the following year--deals that soured for the buyers. In 1994 he engaged in highly publicized negotiations to take...
...China Blues (Anchor Books). Jan Wong, the privileged daughter of Chinese-Canadian parents in Montreal, became a true-believing Maoist and decided in 1972 to return to the land of her ancestors. The journey was bumpy and led to disillusionment--and also to this lively and shrewd reminiscence. Wong still loves China, but she can laugh at it and her youthful enthusiasms...
Raban, an English travel writer resettled in the U.S., is a good and shrewd observer. He sees the origins of today's political attitudes--the Westerners' reflexive contempt for environmentalism and genial hatred of the Federal Government--in the homesteaders' ordeal by hailstorm and bankruptcy. But what makes Bad Land exceptional, on a level with William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways and PrairyErth, is a pervasive sense of yearning. The author is powerfully drawn to this hard country, this broad and nearly featureless landscape, and the reader does not doubt that had Raban been born in 1880, he would...