Word: shrewdness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...specter of free agency can make even a shrewd organization nervous. The Pittsburgh Pirates, with a core of fine young stars, got that now-or-never feeling this year. Why? Because slugger Bobby Bonilla is expected to become a zillionaire elsewhere this winter, and Most Valuable Player candidate Barry Bonds may walk next October. Pittsburgh, in a modest TV market, certainly can't afford them both. So the bucks -- and the Bucs -- stop here...
...LADY OF THE TORTILLA. When he's not winning Emmys for writing Sesame Street, Luis Santeiro is a shrewd satirist of fellow Cuban Americans, as in this off-Broadway piece about a woman's religious vision arising from scorch marks on her dinner...
...Like shrewd roulette players, the Japanese are spreading their money around, spending millions on overseas research projects. Since the country lacks the experience to build an HSCT on its own, the Japanese are investing "just enough in both European and American projects so they can jump in with the winner and become partners," says John Swihart, a U.S. aerospace consultant...
Sexton was both a victim and a manipulator, as these things often go. She was shrewd, self-centered, half cracked. She abused her children. In episodes of rage she would seize her daughter Linda and choke or slap her, and one day she threw the little girl across the room. Linda says that when she was older, in her teens, her mother sexually abused her. The poet had many love affairs during her 24-year marriage, including a long sexual involvement with her psychiatrist -- a disgraceful breach of medical ethics on the doctor's part. Sexton actually paid for these...
Does the poet's work redeem the poet's mess? Sexton was working in a rich literary tradition. Her immediate American predecessors were not a wholesome precedent: John Berryman (alcoholic, suicide), Robert Lowell (episodically psychotic), Delmore Schwartz (alcoholic), Theodore Roethke (manic-depressive), Elizabeth Bishop (alcoholic). Sexton had shrewd instincts. "With used furniture he makes a tree," she wrote. "A writer is essentially a crook." Maybe...