Word: shrewdness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Despite all his gifts -- his shrewd intelligence, his dedication and sense of public service, his mastery of political strategy -- there was a quality of self-destructiveness that haunted Nixon. To an admiring aide he once acknowledged, "You continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance...
Caleb Carr's shrewd and amiable entertainment The Alienist (Random House; 496 pages; $22) is a good psychological thriller, but what makes it exceptional is that it is also a remarkable time-machine voyage. Carr sets us down in New York City -- yes, there's the American Museum of Natural History right where it belongs, at 79th and Central Park West -- but the date is 1896, a year poised more delicately than most between past and future. Horses still pull cabs, but telephones are fairly common. New York is still a rowdy port city, but finance has replaced shipping...
...definitely not the heir apparent: Eugene Roberts, who at 61 is four years Lelyveld's senior and who left the Times in 1972 to transform the soggy Philadelphia Inquirer into one of the nation's foremost dailies. Lelyveld calls the low-key, deceptively shrewd Roberts "one of the great strategic thinkers in journalism," a judgment shared by most people in the industry. Several have tried to lure Roberts back into editing since he retired in 1990, after spurring his Inquirer staff to win 17 Pulitzer Prizes in 18 years on topics ranging from the intricacies of the federal budget...
Although South Dakota's Thomas Daschle is barely into his second term in the U.S. Senate, he has taken a surprising lead in the quiet but intense race to succeed the retiring George Mitchell as majority leader, the upper chamber's top job. Daschle's shrewd strategy: woo influential incumbent Senators as well as rising Democratic stars who seem likely to ascend to the Senate come November. Among Daschle's targets are two of his former House colleagues, Tennessee's Jim Cooper and Missouri's Alan Wheat...
...visit my doctors, and they know all my organism by observation, and they can all testify that there is no circumcision. Or, I am ready to show a commission of objective doctors from Israel and the U.S." ... Friday: Richard Nixon, just back from Moscow, described Zhirinovsky as "shrewd" and a "holy fool...